Workplace Productivity: 7 Proven Ways to Improve Employee Efficiency

Are you struggling with low productivity levels in your company? If so, you may need to change how you work to enable your employees to perform with maximum efficiency.

Several important tweaks may be necessary to achieve this, from how you are delegating work to providing better productivity tools.

With over 10 years of management experience, I have found that there are some more effective strategies than others.

Here is a look at 7 practical strategies to help you improve employee efficiency in your organization:

1. Make the Most of Remote Work

Most employers that adopted remote work for the first time in 2019 did so for pandemic-related reasons.

Several months later, more companies reported increased productivity from their telecommuting workforce.

GMR Transcription went fully remote and found that our production levels were still the same. By all indications, this model will remain relevant beyond the COVID-19 era.

Consider incorporating the following ideas to achieve significant productivity gains with remote working:

• A hybrid model: Not everyone in your organization can be more productive working from home. Sometimes your team members may want to be in the office together to collaborate and finish projects. Having employees come into the office 2-3 days is a great option to ensure efficiency.
• Provide the necessary infrastructure: Effective virtual communication requires appropriate remote work software and secure high-bandwidth connectivity for video. Provide your employees with the appropriate infrastructure for it. For example, if your employees work from home, give them a stipend to build their at-home office.

2. Delegate Where Applicable

Delegation of authority is one of the most underrated productivity strategies for the workplace.

However, assigning key responsibilities to trustworthy and qualified employees can allow decisions to be executed even without your direct intervention.

It empowers your team, letting them spend more time working rather than running every small detail to you. 

Related: How to Delegate Work Effectively And Improve Productivity

3. Change the Way You Communicate

For the most competitive organizations, real-time tracking of work orders and collaboration on tasks between multi-disciplinary teams or members of the same team is necessary. Unfortunately, today, email is not always adequately effective in this area.

Therefore, you may need to invest in modern productivity tools that facilitate real-time workforce communication and collaboration. These technologies can boost employee efficiency in your organization by up to 20%.

At GMR Transcription Services, Inc., we use Trillian to communicate with our contractors and full-time team members. This helps reduce the amount of email communication.

4. Match Skills and Character to Roles

Do not require your employees to master every role available, as that will only eat into their productivity. Instead, hire and assign responsibilities based on skills.

It is also important that you learn as much as possible about each employee’s personality and behavioral styles once you bring them on board.

For example, introverted individuals can enter data, analyze or perform research-oriented tasks. However, they are not usually the best people to pitch to prospects.

See Also: 5 Tips to Work Smart and Make Every Meeting Productive

5. Offer Incentives and Reward Your Team

Recognizing and rewarding your best performers can inspire better performance. So can a personal expression of gratitude like saying “thank you.”

While bonuses and commissions are the standard incentives to drive workforce productivity, some other ways to reward productivity include:

• Offering extra paid time off besides the normal vacation or sick leave
• Public recognition on social media or company blog
• Taking your team out for lunch 
• Sending your team member congratulatory flowers or snacks.

6. Set Clear, Achievable Goals

Employees can use their time at work better when their assignments have clear objectives.

Ensure that each team member understands what is expected of them within a specific duration. You should be as precise and straightforward as possible when describing tasks or project deliverables in all relevant aspects or metrics, such as quality, quantity, cost, and timelines.

7. Promote Employee Growth and Development

You cannot always trust learning on the job to bring the best out of your employees or accelerate their professional development.

This approach can impact productivity as workers will be haphazardly trying to execute their official roles without adequate guidance and relevant competencies.

To develop and empower your personnel much faster, try more efficient methods.

These include:

• Additional training: This imparts the skills your employees require to perfectly accomplish their tasks without supervision. It minimizes hours wasted communicating back and forth with supervisors or fixing errors due to incompetence.
• Ongoing employee development: You can achieve this with continuing mentorship and coaching for individual workers. Well-mentored workers perfect their craft over time, increasing their value to your company.

Bottlenecks like ineffective communication, poor skills-to-job matching, or unwillingness to delegate can cause significant losses in productivity.

If you are experiencing these issues in your company, you could turn things around by modernizing your workforce and process management approaches.

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