Being an employee brings different emotions and moods. Therefore, business owners should consider these things and try to understand that employees are also human.

Productivity in the business is one of the main elements of success. If you disregard your employees’ feelings and opinions, productivity will possibly decline together with your business. Below are simple tips on how to improve employee productivity.

Tips on How to Improve Employee Productivity

1. Establish Tasks and Goals

Establishing tasks and goals for your employees are common ways of improving your employees’ creativity. Some business owners let their employees do a job without telling the specific goal or task. The absence of specific instruction will cause confusion as employees won’t know what task was done and what was not.

Setting the tasks of your employees can benefit the process of your business. This step speeds up the process since they will be aware of the specific task to do, thereby improving their productivity.

A goal is important when it comes to business. Awareness of the company’s goal causes employees to exert more effort on what they do especially if they will be motivated to achieve it. Employees adjust if they feel that that existing efforts fall short to reach their goal.

2. Reward the Deserving

Incentives should be given to employees who do their best and to those who stand out among the others. Do you remember the feeling of receiving an incentive because of your hard work? This is the same emotion that you should let your deserving employees feel.

So why do you need to give incentives?

Incentives make them feel special. Being recognized at work promotes bonds in the workplace. In addition, it keeps them motivated on what they do because they look forward for the reward in exchange of their hard work.

Though it is good to give them an incentive, it wouldn’t be wise to let them get it easy. You should challenge your employee to help them improve their skills and talents. However, don’t make it too difficult because it could exhaust them, which may lead them to become uninterested.

3. Give Them Enough Time to Sleep

It may sound ridiculous but take this seriously. If you are running a business, you should have concern to your employees and give them enough time to sleep. The scenario that follows may sound weird, but this happens in reality.

Some business owners or the companies themselves make their employees work past their normal working hours. Some employees love working overtime, but the productivity suffers. Since they are working past their normal working hours, they will eventually get tired, which results to poor productivity.

4. Avoid Distractions

Are you familiar with the story of Steve Jobs? He was one of the founders of Apple Inc. but because of different distractions that happened in his life, he was fired by the management of the company that he founded himself.

This is not usually the case, but you should be professional enough to handle your own business and leave all distractions outside. It won’t be easy, but at least you should try to leave all worries and distractions behind if you don’t want to waste all your efforts in your business.

Distractions can affect your employees’ productivity. As some say, leader is the head. Thus, if anything happen to the head, the body will follow. If you fail to do your job as a leader, then they might also fall.

5. Ensure Employees Also Love What You Do

We can’t deny that there are different kinds of people with different styles and passion. If you will hire people who will work for you, then you have to make sure that they love working on the industry of business that you have.

Productivity is an essential part of any business because the employees’ passion will affect it. It is common for some workers to be unproductive on something that they don’t love to do. On the contrary, productivity will increase if a person loves what he/she does.

Things can be done without making you feel annoyed because you love doing it. But once you are forced to do things or when you do tasks only because you are paid, you will not exert extra effort to excel. You’re doing it just for money.

This situation could be applied with business owners. You should not hire someone who’s not willing to help you succeed in the business. The company would suffer because of poor quality and poor productivity, thus money would be wasted.

6. Don’t Hesitate, Just Start

Hesitating is a common thing that most people do that leads to disasters. As a business owner, you should always remind your employee to pay attention to their productivity. It is one of the best ways to make them improve or at least maintain their productivity level—by reminding them.

If they hesitate, then remind them not to worry. If they really know what they are doing, then let them start. You can check afterward if they did the right thing. This is a good opportunity to let them learn by their experience and guide them on what they do.

7. Keep a Notebook and a Pen in the Workplace

New businesses or new strategies start from ideas. You can surely think of different ideas, but it would be great if your employees can also suggest something that can help your business. So be sure to get some notebook and pen ready on your workplace.

In addition, your employee can use these things to improve their productivity. There will always be a time when a certain employee forgets what should be done or is not sure if the work was done. A notebook and a pen can help them in that case.

Furthermore, notebooks and pens can help them fight boredom during their spare time. If they do want to draw something or want to release their stress by writing, then these things would be a great help for them.

8. Encourage Them to Exercise

We all know how important our health is especially when we are working for our family. Let your employees know how important exercise is. It would improve not only their health but also their productivity.

Though you can’t expect everyone to go to a gym to exercise, remind them that a little exercise at home will do and that it will benefit them. The best thing that exercise can do is adopt resilience to manage stress and reduce anxiety.

9. Organize Everything

Organizing everything in your workplace is one of the easiest ways to make your employees more productive. If everything else falls in the right place, employees will need less time to look for things. This can speed up their productivity.

Don’t focus only on organizing the physical things, you also need to organize everything with regard to work tasks. Be sure that you are certain to every task you give them and organize these tasks very well to avoid confusion among your employees.

If you are not sure on the things happening in your business, then your employees’ productivity level might be affected. So, make sure to organize everything or get someone to organize them for you.

10. Learn to Say No

Sometimes opportunities come all at once but you only need to choose one. However, some business owners try getting all those opportunities that could make their employees’ productivity level to decrease.

If you get all those workload, then your employees might need to work on different tasks. Working on different tasks causes decrease in productivity level. You should always decide with your lead and learn to say no if you think you can’t handle all of them at the same time.

11. Find a Mentor

If you have problems on finding a way to improve employee productivity, then you should look for help from someone who’ve already done it. Find a mentor who can teach you different ways and methods that you can do to improve employee productivity.

It would be best to find someone in the same industry, because that person can teach you not just the things that could improve employee productivity but also more tips and tricks for your business.

Some seeks consultation from professionals who are in the same industry for a long time. This would be best since they have passed through a difficult stage.

12. Avoid Multitasking

Multitasking is a very interesting skill; however, you should not make your employees do it. Doing different tasks at the same time speeds up the process however it also decreases the quality and can easily lose concentration.

Let them work on a certain task one at a time. This would help them become more organized and more focused on what they do. It can also improve productivity and quality of the work.

13. Create Feedbacks

This task is usually for people who are in management-level position. As a business owner, you should schedule yourself on giving feedback for your employee. You can’t expect yourself to give them all a good feedback. Be honest to yourself and give them the feedback they deserve.

Feedback is a way to let your employees know about their performance in your company. Feedback can motivate or disappoint them. Either way, it will still help to improve their productivity.

14. Create a Desirable Place to Work

If you really want your employees to be productive in what they do for your business, then you should have a desirable place to work. The workplace can change the mood of your employees every time.

There are some cases where employees want to be productive, but their mood changes fast once they are not in a desirable or convenient place.

15. Create Opportunities

Creating opportunities makes your employees to have something to look forward too. Unlike giving incentives, this is a chance for them to grow. When you create one, you let them have the opportunity to improve not only their skills but also their position.

In business terms, they call this promotion. Nothing much would change except for some salary increase and change of tasks. This would be a very good opportunity for most employees. This will give them more motivation to continue their hard work.

What makes your employees productive?

Do you have any strategies or ideas that you currently working on to make your employees productive? Let us know your thoughts by commenting below or by sharing your feedback about this article.

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