Behind every successful business is a set of hardworking, talented people with a great strategy. More so, productivity in the workplace determines whether you can beat the competition or not. As a result, employees need to work smarter, not harder. Keep reading to get new ideas for boosting workplace productivity.
Strategies for Maximizing Effectiveness in the Workplace
Here are innovative ways to maximize the effectiveness of workers:
Use Reminders
There’s much work to be done in the workplace every day that it becomes very easy to forget some tasks or even postpone them. You may want to look up eat the frog meaning to understand how this might be affecting your life outside the workplace. Use reminder apps to track the tasks for each day and the hours required to achieve them.
Map Out a Simple Plan
It’s good to set goals, but sometimes they look really ambiguous. And when this happens, you become too overwhelmed to take the first step. Making your plan simple with a clear focus can help you achieve your goals faster. Ensure your goals are SMART – specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound.
Evaluate Your Performance Regularly
While goal-setting is important, reviewing your goals is more important because it helps you to track your performance. Ensure you check your performance every day or weekly. If you’re heading a team, have your teammates send in their progress reports by the end of the week.
Utilize Technology
Although technology is among the productivity killers, you can use it to your advantage. Some applications can make you more efficient, especially when collaborating with a team. They include Slack, Evernote, Google, and Dropbox.
Create a Break Room
When all you do in the office is work, your morale becomes low over time. This also affects your productivity. Having a break room in the workplace is an amazing remedy to this problem.
This is not a window for employees to stay idle during business hours. An ideal break room should have a workout section, massage chairs, hammocks for short naps, video games, and ice-cream machines. You can check out this website to get more ideas. Spending a minimum of one hour in the break room leaves a refreshing effect that makes the brain think better and faster.
Delegate Tasks
It’s okay to multitask, but it’s better to handle one task at a time. Trying to do everything at once makes you slow. Most times, this is the effect of setting unrealistic goals. To stay on top of your game, delegate tasks to those who have the skills to handle them better. However, ensure that all team members have an equal workload.
Prioritize Wellness Programs
Your health, both mental and physical, can affect your effectiveness. You can sign up for a wellness program or encourage your employer to set up one for the company. The program may include plans for weight loss, fitness, and health screenings.
Stay Motivated
Motivation can be intrinsic or extrinsic. Intrinsic motivation comes from within. It is one’s resolve to be successful just for personal satisfaction. Extrinsic motivation refers to external rewards, such as a vacation or a shopping voucher, for completing your tasks.
Rewarding yourself as well as your team members is one of the ways to stay motivated. But you need to balance it with self-motivation.
Change Meeting Patterns
Meetings could get boring when held for long hours thereby reducing productivity levels. And since you can’t avoid meetings in the workplace, you have to do something to spice them up. Rather than sit in the same spot all the time, encourage your team members to try a different sitting arrangement. You can also have a standing meeting.
To increase the performance of each individual, schedule regular one-on-one meetings to find out how they are coping with the workload. Some people may not be able to share their ideas openly, but personalized meetings could help to break the ice.
Take Note of These Productivity Killers
Whether you’re working from home or in your office, several activities can distract you from achieving your daily tasks. Here are some productivity killers to avoid:
Social Media
There are 8 popular social media platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Tiktok, YouTube, WhatsApp, and Snapchat. You probably have at least 3 on your smartphone. Funny enough, you may innocently check a Facebook notification and then end up spending the rest of the day chatting with friends and commenting and liking posts.
It’s best to keep your phone away when you have work to do. You can also designate some time, preferably mid-day, to use social media. But this should serve as a reward for completing half of your tasks for the day. However, some offices do not allow the use of phones during business hours.
Chatty Colleagues
In a shared workspace, you can’t stop your colleagues from holding conversations. Initially, you may try to exempt yourself, but for how long? Gradually, you will find yourself joining the convo instead of working. This is not only distracting but also extends the time it takes you to hit your target.
It is important to build a rapport with colleagues. However, this should be done after work, during lunch, or in the break room. You may want to visit https://hbr.org/ to learn how to build rapport with co-workers.
Unending Meetings
Meetings are necessary. But when they become too many and require the attendance of all staff members, they encroach into the company’s productive hours. At the end of the day, not much work would be done. Therefore, meetings should have agendas and conclude immediately if there is a resolution.
Also, if there’s information you want to pass across to the entire team, use phone calls instead of emails. You can also use collaboration tools to send quick messages or have a quick video chat. Tools that support real-time conversations are very effective.
Procrastination
When you have too much work to do, you tend to move some to the next day. Unfortunately, some tasks might go unaccomplished because of procrastination. To become more efficient, set deadlines for each task and be accountable to someone. Having an accountability partner keeps you on your toes so you can meet your target. You can also use tools that help to track and measure goals.
Final Thoughts
When employees experience burnout, they become less productive. It does not only lead to procrastination but also affects their physical and mental health. In fact, when they call in sick, the company loses both time and money.
Vacations and breaks can greatly improve the health and wellness of you and your team members. They refresh the mind and reduce fatigue. Nowadays, people do not need to be physically present in the office before they can work. You can utilize collaboration tools to grow your remote workforce and reduce the stress of commuting to and from the office.