As a business owner, you have many responsibilities, which include dealing with clients and business partners and searching for innovative new methods to improve the quality of your business and the products and services you offer. However, alongside this, you also have a duty to manage your team effectively and to search for ways in which you can help to increase the overall productivity of your business. A lot of this comes down to how well your employees work individually and as a team, but there are also a number of other factors to consider. Implementing new strategies into your business with the aim of improving productivity is essential if you are to boost the success and profitability of your company. Here are some key strategies that can help you do this.
- Utilise Project Management Tools
Keeping on top of your projects, especially if you have many different ones in progress, is essential. While juggling many different projects and tasks, it’s easier to make mistakes, especially if those projects aren’t managed correctly. This is why it’s a great idea to implement some form of project management system into your business. There are many benefits of using project management tools. Software like this can help you to keep everyone in your team aware of what everyone else is doing. It allows everyone to work on the same projects, collaborating on certain tasks, without overtaking or taking on work that is already in progress. This helps to prevent the risk of time-wastage and also removes the need for people to have meetings and plan their work regularly too.
- Review Your Team’s Daily Goals
Along with project management, you’ll want to ensure that your team are setting realistic goals. Daily goals are a great way to keep everyone on track and can also be done via project management software. As a business owner, it can take some time to go through everyone’s goals to review them, so ideally, your managers will do this to ensure that everyone is okay with their workloads. You should then request daily reports from your managers summarising the work being done by their teams. This allows you to keep in touch with everything that is being done within your business and will also allow you to make any important changes that you feel should be made.
- Don’t Overcomplicate Things
Remember that the strategies you implement into your business don’t need to be overly complicated. Strategies inherently sound as though they need to be in-depth plans with many different stages and clauses. However, you can create a very simple strategy for boosting your team’s productivity by keeping things concise and clearly stating the strategy’s ultimate goal. Making these things overly complex can confuse your team and may actually end up reducing productivity in the end. You can make use of something known as the SMART framework if you need a simple template for your strategies. This stands for specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely. If you ensure that all of your strategies and goals follow the SMART framework, your team will struggle to complete the task.
- Cut Down On Unnecessary Activities
One of the biggest issues that impact the productivity of businesses today is time-wasting activities. There are only a certain number of hours in the workday, and while it’s unreasonable to expect your employees to work at full power throughout the day, there are many things that they don’t need to be doing and can use that time for better things. Most of the time, this time-wasting comes in the form of unnecessary meetings, especially when people take part when they don’t need to be there. Meetings are important at times, as they allow individuals to efficiently share critical information about their work and plans. However, not every stage of a project requires a full team meeting. Implement some rules for meetings, such as limiting the number of people that should be involved in each meeting and even who can call a meeting in the first place. You could limit this to managerial staff, for example, and then they can summarise anything important in a team e-mail afterwards.
- Boost The Morale Of Your Employees
A common enemy of productivity is low morale. Many factors can contribute to your team’s morale, and it’s your duty to ensure that your team are happy and motivated. There are many ways to boost your team’s morale, and you should do everything you can to find some positive strategies for doing so. For example, you could offer more perks for your employees or treat everyone to the occasional company party or meal. Flexible working hours are also a popular thing to implement to improve morale. Hiring a great HR team is very important as they’ll be able to help you with managing team morale and motivation. As well as this, you should provide them with useful HR software such as myhrtoolkit. This will help reduce their need to complete mundane, menial tasks and instead focus their efforts on ensuring your employees are happy. If you’re looking for some corporate event entertainment to boost your team’s morale, you could consider hiring a comedian or booking a team-building activity.
- Focus On Individual Tasks
When you let your team frequently multitask, regardless of their belief in their ability to juggle many tasks, you’ll often find that more mistakes will be made. As well as this, it’s also been proven that multitasking will actually reduce the productivity of individuals significantly. When we try to split our focus across many different jobs, we spend a large portion of that time switching gears and focusing on a new task. Instead, we should be putting our full effort into one specific job where possible and avoiding the delay we experience when switching tasks. You should also try to delegate the work equally across your team too and give employees their most preferred tasks as some people will be better at some things than others. You should also set realistic goals and expectations for each task and project so that your team understands that they don’t need to try to do too much at once.
- Consider A Wellness Program
You should put a lot of consideration into the physical and mental health of your employees. When a member of your team falls ill, they might have to take a significant amount of time off work, which can be related to their physical and mental health. While you can’t exactly prevent every illness, you can take some steps to provide your employees with opportunities to improve their health. Implementing some form of wellness program in your business could be a good idea. This could be something like free gym memberships, fitness classes, counselling or even full health care. Your ultimate goal should be to reduce the risk of health problems which could have been avoided.
- Hold Regular One-To-Ones
Keeping tabs on the well-being of your team is important, and another way of doing this is to hold regular one-to-one meetings. They can meet with you, a member of your management team, or someone from HR who can then report back to you. These meetings should be held with the intent of finding out any problems or concerns that your employees are having. Once these issues have been identified, you can work to remedy them and get your team members back on track with their work. Stress and mental health problems can significantly impact our ability to work to our full potential. Anyone can suffer from these problems, so be aware of this.
