20 WAYS TO BE MORE PRODUCTIVE – Give People More Work To Do
Productivity means higher output using your current resources, or achieving the same level of sales with less resource.
I’m going to start with the elephant in the room. We live in a culture of “you can’t treat people like robots”, and not wanting to “put people under too much pressure”. In a 2015 salary.com survey of 750 employees, 89% of workers admitted to flittering away time at work, with almost a third of the respondents, 31%, wasting up to an hour a day of company time. When those same respondents were asked why, over one third said it was because they don’t feel motivated or challenged enough in their work.
This highlights the lack of leadership and poor management prevalent in the UK at the moment, primarily due to a little training and development. If managers are on top of their game, understand their teams capabilities and capacities, they’ll be in a much stronger position to plan more work, make it more interesting and constantly be striving to engage employees in achieving more output in their working day.
A possible solution to build on your management information is introducing simple task monitoring tools to set expectations, and maybe keep staff away from internet distractions.
Task management apps such as Hours Tracker, or software such as Asana and Replicon, allow everyone to share progress, make workloads transparent and easily monitored, and gives the manager a tool for team motivation and boosting throughput.
On a more fundamental level, managers should be controlling the volume of work delegated to each of their staff, and more importantly how long the work should take. By sharing out plenty of work, at least 10% more than the individuals time available, then the time wasting will be reduced, and your recruitment needs may suddenly become fewer.
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