Efficient production of the goods or services your business offers is crucial to its success. After all, time is money and if it’s being wasted it’s as good as throwing profits down the drain.
Fortunately, there are many things you can do to improve productivity in the workplace. Keep reading to find out what these simple strategies are.
Minimise meetings
First of all, if you want your business to be as productive as possible, you will need to work on your culture. What this means is encouraging a strong foundation of habits that promote productivity day to day.
One way to do this is to minimise the amount of in-person meetings that you hold as these can be a massive drain on productivity. Try using DMs, or video meetings instead. Especially when it would otherwise require travel off-site.
If an IRL face-to-face meeting does need to happen, limit the number of people that attend. A one-to-one is always the best, and most productive. Make sure that you limit the duration of the meeting as well with a maxim of 30 mins.
Keep things simple
There is a phenomenon in business where processes are developed over time, borrowing from the experiences of those that were tasked with doing them before.
However, such an approach can get very complicated very fast. Instead, you must focus on keeping things as simple as possible. The good news is that regular audits of your work processes can help you cut out any unnecessary stages and keep productivity high.
Promote organisation
Another way that you can encourage a culture of productivity is to promote the organisation in the workplace. This is because an organised workplace is not only safer and less stressful for employees but also allows them to find exactly what they are looking for right away. This can save a great deal of time and effort, as well as help to keep morale high. All of which will have a positive impact on productivity.
Limit social media use
Social media will have a place in your business, as it’s a vital way of connecting with potential customers. However, there is a big difference between using social media for work, and pleasure. Unfortunately, studies show that employees tend to waste around 2 hours a day using social media when they should be working on business-related tasks, which can really slow your business down.
To that end, having a very clear policy on social media use, and limiting it to those on your marketing team during the day can have a positive effect on productivity.
Outsources any jobs that your team doesn’t specialise in
Productivity is always at its best when people are engaged in tasks that they have experience and training doing. Indeed, it is very likely that you have gone through a specific recruitment process with your employees choosing the ones that are best qualified for the tasks at hand.
With this in mind, wasting productivity by expecting workers to do tasks that they are not specialised in is counterintuitive.
For example, your sales team may be able to close any deal that comes their way but knows very little about IT. That is why it is well worth investing in managed IT Services for your business. Indeed, by using such a service you can ensure that your sales team always have access to the programs and apps they need to do their job well, without expecting them to take time out of their day to update their systems or solve issues.
Invest in a productivity tracker
So much valuable time and effort can be saved by switching to a productivity tracker. Such trackers allow your manners to see the progress of each individual on their team, as well as how complete their project overall.
Additionally, a productivity tracker will cut out the need for meetings for things like checking goals, and problem-solving. Instead, you can just go to the person with the issue and solve it directly, something that allows everyone else to continue with their work.
Ban multitasking
It is about time that we face the truth about multitasking. That is it’s not a thing that we as humans can do. Instead, when someone claims to be multitasking, what they are doing is switching their attention from one task to another very quickly. This is a very inefficient way of working and is not sustainable over the long term.
To that end, banning multitasking in the office is a great idea, be sure to promote batching tasks instead. This is where an employee collects groups of the same task together and focuses on only them, for example doing all invoices in one session rather than as they come during the week. By batching you will help improve focus and performance rather than hinder them.
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