Surprisingly, the average employee is only productive for less than three hours every day. Research conducted by VoucherCloud showed that most employees are productive for only two hours and 23 minutes per day.
As a result, your employees are unproductive for a staggering 5 hours and 37 minutes every day. Cumulatively, the unproductivity is costing you a significant amount of money each year.
So which strategies can you adopt to get the most out of your employees? Here are a few things you can do to boost employee efficiency in your business;
1. Set Well-defined Goals
When goals are confusing, your employees tend to be stranded. They don’t know what you expect from them. As a result, they are likely to be under immense pressure.
Besides that, they may second guess their efforts. On the other hand, clear and well-defined goals will make your workers more efficient. They will know what you want and when you expect it.
Consequently, they don’t have to waste time wondering if they are doing the right thing. Clear goals allow them to allocate their time to various tasks accordingly.
Ensure that you give your employees specific, measurable, attainable, and realistic goals. The objective is to have productive employees.
2. Be Careful Not to Overwork Your Employees
When you overwork your employees, you reduce their efficiency. First off, you put them under a lot of pressure. They feel that there is a lot to do, and the time is not enough.
Instead of focusing their energy on one task, they may fall into the multitasking trap. Their main concern becomes finishing the job. When a worker is only worried about doing it fast and not doing it well, the quality of their work suffers.
Assign fewer tasks with a reasonable timeline to your workers. When an employee has adequate time to work on a project, they execute it with precision.
As a result, the work has minimum errors and managing employees becomes easy. The worker utilizes company resources well. They not only save the employers time but also money.
3. Provide Adequate Training for Your Employees
Employee disengagement costs the U.S. economy a whopping $450 billion to $550 billion per year. Unfortunately, many factors affect employee efficiency. These include poor communication, outdated technologies, ineffective management, and much more
It may seem like training is expensive, but it is also necessary. Sometimes, cutting down the training budget can have far-reaching effects.
You need to guide your team on how to accomplish various tasks. Otherwise, they are bound to make multiple mistakes. Each time they have to repeat a task, they require more time and resources.
Providing adequate training is the best way to build an efficient team. Besides their original training, introduce development programs. Help them to advance their skills so that they can do more.
They are many ways to train employees. These may include individual coaching, seminars, workshops, and so on.
Eventually, you will have extremely competent and productive employees.
4. Provide Regular and Honest Feedback
When managing employees, it is vital to provide regular and honest feedback. While doing so, appreciate their efforts and also let them the areas that need improvement. Point out their mistakes in a positive light to avoid making them feel inadequate.
Investing in software for employee monitoring will be instrumental in generating feedback. You can use this model to help your team understand and improve their performance.
Transparent feedback will foster employee development. It will help your employees to understand your company culture and empower them to deliver accordingly.
5. Focus On Effective Communication
Communication is key to workplace efficiency. You want a team that can reach the management easily when there is a problem. Regardless of whether they are working from home or in the office, an open communication channel is invaluable.
Encourage a conversation between your workers and their supervisors or managers. Provide adequate communication mediums such as email, phone calls, video calls, and so on. A worker should get a message across to their superiors without any problems.
Effective communication will increase employee efficiency remarkably.
6. Offer Incentives
Offering incentives can help to motivate employees. If one of your workers goes out of their way to deliver on a particular project, applaud them. The recognition you give them will want the rest to work hard and excel.
When rewarding the best employees, consider their tastes and preference. For instance, most extroverts thrive on public recognition. On the flip side, introverts prefer to be appreciated privately.
Also, there are many types of rewards that make workers happy. Some will relish a vacation with their family. Others will be tremendously moved by a bonus.
The bottom line is that incentives will make your workforce want to achieve more.
7. Create a Conducive Working Environment
The working environment has a tremendous impact on employees. For instance, workers in an open office are likely to engage in a small talk every few minutes. They will pause their work and discuss the weekend or politics.
Such a habit makes them less efficient. Furthermore, other employees around them want to focus on their work. However, the impromptu conversations keep distracting their efforts.
Creating a conducive working environment is one of the best ways to increase efficiency. Ensure that each one of your employees has adequate and comfortable working space.
If your workers are not teaming up for a particular project, they should work individually. Employees tend to accomplish more when working alone.
8. Avoid Excesses
Most employers will assign small tasks to employees who are working on high-priority projects. These unnecessary tasks throw the worker in question off balance. It kills their momentum and motivation.
Usually, it will take your employee a lot of time to build the momentum for the bigger project. The small task will interfere with their chain of thoughts. They may even forget some brilliant ideas they had developed for the high-priority assignment.
If possible, avoid disrupting employees with the excesses. Allow them to work on one project at a time. The goal is to increase their efficiency. Without any disruptions, they are likely to deliver quality in good time.
Increase Employee Efficiency and Watch your Business Thrive
If you feel like your workforce is yet to reach its peak potential, use the insight we have provided above to increase employee efficiency. Focus on the area that needs improvement, and you will start getting encouraging results gradually.
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