Are you happy to see your business struggle and flounder at the foot of its market, or do you want it to scale the heights of its industry? If your company is to reach its full potential and one day become an industry-leading organization, everybody involved in your daily operations needs to be pulling in the same direction. Quite simply, if you want your lofty aspirations and dreams to become your reality, you and your employees need to be working in a highly productive fashion day in, day out.
If your workplace productivity levels are currently leaving a lot to be desired, you should waste no time in improving them. To find three ways that this can be achieved, be sure to read on.
Understand what challenges you face
If your workforce hasn’t been performing in a particularly productive manner as of late, there will no doubt be a number of underlying issues that are causing the overall disruption. If you’re to contend with the lack of productivity in your workplace in the most effective way possible, you must have a clear understanding of these issues and the specific challenges that you face. Arming yourself with this information will allow you to make more informed decisions going forward with regards to delegating tasks, issuing warnings, and even hiring new employees.
One of the best ways to accumulate the information that you need in this instance is to make use of Inpulse’s expert People & HR Analytics tool. Should you implement this tool into your workplace, you will be able to find out what emotions, feelings, thoughts, and values are driving your employees to behave in an unproductive manner.
Specifically, using the Inpulse pulse survey tool will help you to:
- Identify and diagnose issues with your workforce early, which in turn will help you to resolve the most pressing issues in your workplace before they escalate
- Ensure that your talented employees are engaged with their work, which will subsequently result in better work being produced and more deadlines being hit
Stress the importance of taking breaks
Breaks play a crucial role in workplace productivity. Should an employee forgo having a break at some point in their working day, they will be liable to suffer from mental fatigue, and their stress levels could heighten. Should either of these scenarios come to fruition, the employee in question will find it challenging to produce work of the highest possible quality. It is for this reason that you must stress the importance of taking breaks to all of your staff members. In fact, you might even want to consider penalizing them if they don’t take time away from their desk at some point during each working day!
Although your employees are free to do whatever they please (within reason, of course!) while they are on their breaks, it will be beneficial to their productivity levels if you push them to perform the following activities during the time they spend away from their desks:
- Make sure they take a real break, not just 60 seconds
- Ensure that they relax and take some time to decompress their previous tasks
- Push them to go outside and get some fresh air
- Ask them to consider giving a small degree of thought to their forthcoming schedule
- Above all else, make sure that they eat and actually enjoy their food
Boost the aesthetic appeal of your workspace
As unlikely as it might sound, the aesthetic appeal of your workspace might be the reason why your workforce’s productivity levels are on the decline. Having something nice to look at in their place of work will actively help them to retain their focus, which in turn will help them to operate in a much more efficient manner.
Here are some workspace fixes that you should make if you want to motivate your workforce to work in a productive fashion:
- Invest in ergonomic furniture
- Introduce live indoor plants into space
- Display a vision/aspiration board for all to see
- Keep the space de-cluttered
- Ensure that the area is well lit
- Make space for a designated break area
- Paint your office in productive colors — check out this in-depth article which discusses which colors you should be using in this instance
If you want your business to reach the pinnacle of both its potential and its industry, then you need to ensure that your employees are working in a productive manner day in, day out. To make sure that this is the case, be sure to put all of the advice laid out above into practice.
