Improving employee efficiency that leads to profitability is the holy grail of every business. And yet, in most organisations, this level of performance is often elusive or sporadic at best.
As unpredictable as sustained employee productivity might seem, making minor changes to habits and tools can drastically improve your business’s productivity and work efficiency.
This article shares five proven ideas that can help you improve employee efficiency in your organisation.
5 Proven Ideas to Improve Employee Efficiency
1. Put values in place to govern your business
In our experience, organisations rise and fall on the quality of their value system. Well established values help staff understand what kind of behaviour is acceptable and unacceptable in an organisation.
For example, we have defined “diligence and getting things done” as one of the core values in our organisation.
Accordingly, we hire only individuals that share this value. The result has been a system that encourages diligence and is unconducive for employees with a laidback attitude to work.
Whatever values you choose to operate your company, be sure that it is communicated and easy for your employees to translate into actions and measures. After all, values without a precise measure of what productivity looks like won’t be very effective.
Furthermore, ensure that your people are empowered to execute the values.
For instance, if your organisation decides that ‘caring customer service’ is a core value, it will require that your frontline employees are fully trained and empowered to deliver the quality of customer service that leaves your clients feeling valued.
Though different roles will require different applications of the core values, everyone must understand what is expected of them, and they should be fully equipped to deliver on the mandate.
2. Develop and promote
Most companies tend to make the mistake of focusing heavily on the here-and-now of their company’s needs that they overlook training and development. This is understandable, especially for an organisation in ‘war-time’.
However, it can quickly prove counterproductive if your employees are expected to do much heavy lifting without a commensurate investment in their learning and development.
When employees are trained and well developed to execute their jobs, it not only improves their level of productivity, it often fosters loyalty to your company, and this ultimately builds your pipeline of future leaders.
It is also important to be mindful of what employees want in their career development changes throughout the stages of their lives. For instance, freshly out of school employees may want the experience necessary to help them build their abilities as professionals and gain promotion.
On the other hand, mid-career employees may seek to become more rounded professionals by making a lateral move into a different department.
Therefore, it is essential to create employee development plans that layout how your employees will acquire needed skills, whether that’s through training or coaching.
3. Create opportunities for renewal and rejuvenation
Just as training and development are essential to rejuvenate employees’ skills and abilities and keep them productive, creating opportunities for breaks is necessary to keep employees healthy and renewed.
We’ve frequently found that a recipe for disaster is to think of your employees as people and yet structure their tasks as you would those of robots.
This attitude will make your employees fatigued and cause burnout before you know it. Unmanaged fatigue will cause your people to feel miserable, and soon enough, they’ll lose the urge to do a good job.
Managers must structure employees’ jobs in ways that take their humanity into consideration. The most effective way to do this is to encourage them to take regular breaks.
Not only will frequent breaks allow employees to recharge and approach their work with more energy and “fresh eyes”, but it will also make them more productive.
A work productivity tip that can lead to higher output is creating 90-minute sessions divided by breaks. During the 90 minutes, each employee should put as much effort as possible into achieving a task. This is followed by a break to recharge.
Creating a flow of 90-minute sessions followed by short breaks is enough time to establish a rhythm and complete tasks without getting burned out.
4. Recognise and reward your employees
The day-to-day grind to deliver stellar performance on the job can get very tiring. Creating a system that boosts performers morale is crucial for sustained productivity.
Motivating and rewarding your team can cultivate a sense of fulfilment and inspire your employees to be more productive. Friendly competitions have the potential to drive performance, especially when you set up a visual that tracks progress.
This can encourage competition and motivate employees to work harder to bypass coworkers. Be sure to celebrate and announce the winners in a way that gets everyone involved so that your employees look forward to the next phase.
Though rewarding top performers is critical to show that a stellar performance is appreciated, it can be discouraging for lower-performing employees to see the same people get rewarded every time.
It’s therefore important to create opportunities for growth and improvement. Consider ways to create incentives to encourage growth in low performing employees.
5. Use time-tracking software.
When people know that how they use their time is being monitored, and they’ll only get paid for how much productive time they put out, it changes everything.
Not only will a time-tracking software improve employee efficiency, but it will also make it easier for your team members to plan their day and know how long each task takes to complete.
Furthermore, business leaders can use these time-tracking reports to see how the business is currently operating and if they’ll need to change things to make it run more efficiently.
Conclusion
When there’s the temptation to consider these measures to improve employee efficiency as tasking, it’s best not to think of it this way.
As long as you’re dealing with human beings, you will have to get creative with ensuring that your employees are happy, motivated and productive. This is the only way to get the business results that you seek.