Key Tips for Boosting Employee Productivity

July 1 2022 - Productivity is a pressing concern for businesses of any size; employee motivation and efficiency are bedrock metrics for output and success, and should be managed effectively to guarantee the best possible footing in competitive markets. But what can you do as a business to improve the productivity of your employees? Here are four simple suggestions that can have a significant impact on employee satisfaction, motivation and hence productivity.

Introduce Flexible Working

The recent pandemic forced a fundamental shift in the way businesses to operate. Government-mandated stay-at-home guidance required offices across the country to adopt remote working technology and flexible working solutions - with the inadvertent effect of demonstrating just how feasible it is to offer flexible working to staff in general.

Prior concerns that flexible working would disincentivise diligent work were proven unfounded; indeed, the opposite has proven to be true, with recent studies showing that 71% of UK employers found flexible working to have either a positive impact on productivity, or no impact whatsoever. In the latter cases, though, employee satisfaction remains positive.

Utilise Cloud Tools

There are other infrastructural provisions you can make as a business to improve employee productivity, where a little investment can have a profound impact on working processes. The best way to facilitate these improvements today is by utilising the cloud.

As employees move to hybrid working agreements across the board, cloud access and collaboration are more important than ever. Cloud HR enables the offsetting of workloads and the minimisation of administrative wrangling, while team communications software and file-sharing software allow seamless development and execution between departments.

Prioritise Training

Investing in staff training can not only have immediate short-term benefits for your business’ overall productivity, but also ensure long-term results. Regular in-house training sessions ensure that everyone on staff remains up to speed, and that there are no bottlenecks within or between departments.

Meanwhile, designing longer-term, targeted training rubrics for staff can help you develop talent from the start. The benefits of this are two-fold: you give your employees confidence that you are invested in their careers, while guaranteeing a high calibre of candidates for future leadership roles.

Incentivise Hard Work

Lastly, sometimes there is no alternative to a good incentive for work well done. Even with support systems and long-term training frameworks in place, it can be just as important for motivation to recognise productivity in the moment.

This can be as simple as a thank-you to employees for turning work in at pace, or a company-wide recognition of individual efforts towards a particular goal. It can also take the form of tangible rewards for the completion of a project, whether gifts or monetary bonuses.

• More Performance Management Articles