Start Pill
The average office worker is productive for less than three hours per day. And even if the situation in your office isn’t as dire, it’s still likely that the time your employees spend at work could be used much more effectively.
However, you can’t simply point your finger at the employees and blame them for the fact that they aren’t using every minute of their workday. It’s just as much on the startup leadership to create an atmosphere that nurtures productivity while also empowering your employees to understand how they can waste less time and move through tasks faster.
But how can you boost employee productivity in the office?
To help you get started, let’s look at a few of the most effective strategies you could consider that will not only boost productivity but will also be appreciated by your team.
Set up Employee Tracking
Employee tracking sometimes gets a bad rep. People can associate it with employers overseeing their team’s every move, looking for any sign of someone not doing their job. But instead of being a surveillance method, it’s actually a helpful method of empowering employees to make the most of their time.
Today, setting up a comprehensive employee tracker for your office is easier than ever, and it brings on a range of benefits that the company and your team will benefit from.
For one thing, you can discover insights about how your employees spend their time, offering advice on what they should focus on instead to become more productive and maximize their productivity. Without guidance, your team members might be prioritizing the wrong tasks, which could not only hurt company performance but end up discouraging people as well.
Help Employees Become More Productive
Another effective method for helping your employees become more efficient in their jobs is teaching them habits that will empower them to make the most of their available time. Most workers today are looking for ways to progress in their careers and will value employers that provide learning opportunities, so you should take advantage of this and offer your team a way to maximize their productivity and become better.
For instance, you could organize a training session where you cover some of the main principles behind Atomic Habits, a book written by bestselling author James Clear. The book relies on scientific research about how humans develop habits to provide a foolproof method for incorporating new, useful habits into a person’s life.
When you teach the principles to your employees, you can help them eliminate habits that serve as distractions that are hindering their progress and allow them to replace those unproductive habits with new ones that directly contribute to better work performance.
Clearly Define Goals
Sometimes, the biggest hurdle towards higher productivity in the office is a lack of focus and direction from the management. If the employees don’t clearly understand what they are working for, they will have a harder time planning their day in a way that benefits your company the most.
Therefore, as an employer, you should have a reliable process for setting goals in a way your employees can understand. That includes not just big-picture goals, which show what your company is working toward in the upcoming months or years, but also more immediate goals that reflect what they should focus on in the coming week or even today.
Because of how vital managing goals in the office can be to employee performance, most businesses today use a project management tool that can help them stay organized and tackle various tasks according to their importance, urgency, and the availability of staff who can handle the challenge.
Prioritize Communication
It’s impossible to develop a productive work environment without effective communication. You need your team to be capable of sharing information, helping each other work through issues, and even teaching one another new skills if you don’t want supervisors to have to micromanage every task.
Luckily, communication is just another skill you can help your employees improve, both individually and as a team. On the individual level, you can improve your team’s communication by starting from the very beginning of an employee’s journey, establishing guidelines, and showing them how they can seek help or share information in a way that’s easy and convenient.
It’s essential to foster the growth of your employees’ communication skills. An effective approach is to organize team-building games in-person to enhance your team’s ability to collaborate seamlessly. Investing in these valuable opportunities can cultivate a harmonious, engaged, and productive work environment.
Conclusion
Every employer wants to ensure that their employees are productive and help the startup grow quickly. But even the most motivated employees need guidance on how to better plan their time, aligning their priorities with company goals.
With the tips listed above, you should be able to understand how your team spends their time, teach better habits that will translate into productivity, set priorities in a way that employees can relate to, and instill good communication practices that will impact every part of your startup.
