Guest Article by Katrina McKinnon
A productive employee is an engaged employee. Your priority as a leader is to keep your workers engaged to improve their performance.
Few companies do that since only about 34% of the workforce in the US feel engaged.
What happens when you don’t pay attention to engagement? Lagging productivity, unhealthy company culture, high rates of absenteeism and high turnover.
It also affects the larger economy if employees are disengaged. In the US alone, they lose $483 to $605 billion annually to low productivity.
How do you begin creating positive change in your organization? You can do it through these effective tactics:
1. Be Deliberate With Creating a Good Workplace Culture
Company culture includes the work environment, goals, ethics, and vision. Creating a positive workplace culture starts with how you treat each other. Being deliberate will build a culture that helps employees be their best selves at work. Culture fit should become the most important lens through which you measure everyone.
Test and Train for Culture Fit
While culture fit might not feel crucial when hiring, it increases employee morale when you bring in someone who acclimates easily. Adjust your hiring practices to test for culture fit. This way, you increase the chances of hiring someone who will fit into your workplace.
A successful culture is one that leads to peak performance. Research by the IOSR Journal of Business and Management shows that cultures that reward teamwork and relationship building lead to increased productivity. Companies focused on hierarchy and individual performance lead to a dip in productivity.
Managers Should Lead by Example
Manage less to get better results. It feels counterintuitive, but most employees love a sense of freedom and autonomy. Let your people take ownership of their time and resources. Autonomy is a stronger motivator than financial gain. It is a self-correcting process that creates independent self-starters. This management method makes your employees feel trusted and increases their morale.
Positive Reinforcement and Rewards
Creating short term productivity goals increases output. They help to divide your tasks into manageable chunks that create momentum. Morning team hurdles are a fast and effective way of sharing goals. If morning group meetings are not possible, make weekly group meetings a priority.
Managers play a big role in reinforcing their team's habits. They can meet individual team members to help them through their week’s workload. It’s a great chance to praise progress while supporting them to perform better.
Train Your Staff Regularly
Training should always be a budget item for your team. There are countless ways to improve productivity, and they can be taught via internal courses. The skills can include spreadsheet manipulation and touch typing. Proper training increases efficiency and productivity.
2. Encourage Self-Care
A company with great policies can't help an employee who doesn't understand the importance of rest and relaxation. Teach self-care, and communicate your commitment to it in the following ways:
Provide Employment Perks That Improve Well-Being
Tech giants are famous for providing unique job perks to ensure their employees have high job satisfaction. They range from nap pods, massage rooms, and complimentary haircuts. You don’t have to do the same, but you can borrow the creativity and thoughtfulness behind them.
A recent Glassdoor study reveals that a majority of people prefer workplace perks to a pay rise. Ideas you can adopt include:
A kindle and a monthly stipend for books
Discounted movie tickets
Days off to enjoy their favorite things
Subsidized gym memberships
Create Wellness and Safety Policies at the Workplace
Depending on the industry you work in, wellness practices can include providing protective clothing, great changing rooms or creating conducive washrooms. It is important to make your employees as comfortable as possible as they do their work. You can do this by creating internal policies or hiring reliable workwear vendors who will help you manage these processes.
If your staff wear uniforms, care and maintenance is the responsibility of the employer. Ensure you provide hygienic lockers to store soiled uniforms and clean washrooms, as well as changing rooms to change into their uniforms. In regards to purchasing uniforms, keep in mind that workwear is measured differently from regular clothes. Learn the correct way to measure workwear/uniforms since well-fitting uniforms help staff to stay safe and comfortable.
Improve Morale to Reduce Employee Burnout
Emphasize self-care for overall mental, physical and emotional health. Burnout means feeling drained of all three spheres and leads to a sharp dip in productivity and morale. Fostering a healthy, communicative company culture prevents burnout. Do this by listening, offering constructive feedback and providing meaningful work.
Another way to do so is occasional team-building exercises that allow the team to bond. Managers need to model these values with good work-life balance and practicing self-care. Normalize self-care and take time off to relax.
3. Encourage Autonomy and Ownership
Micro-management is an unproductive, vicious cycle. Managers hover, employees get nervous and under-perform, leading managers to keep hovering. There’s a new way of operating. Aim to trust your people with day to day tasks while you become a coach and strategic guide.
This is how to start your journey to building a culture of trust and autonomy:
Provide Tools and Tech to Support Productivity
When working with a finite number of hours, improve productivity through tools that maximize brain power. Take advantage of natural energy rhythms. Start with collaboration tools that allow you to assign tasks and log the time spent on them. This allows you to have a glimpse at each person’s workload and help where needed.
Communication tools also help your team organize messages in a way that is easy to reference. Email tends to be the main communication channel, but it’s easy to lose track of information. With new apps like Slack, you can chat and share files with your teams. These tools are great for both co-located and remote teams.
Introduce Remote Work Arrangements
Remote workers tend to be more productive. Companies are catching on, and Gallup reports the number of employees working remotely jumped from 39% to 43% from 2012 to 2016. Take advantage of the fact that remote workers log in more hours, take less sick leave and perform better. Experiment with a few people, and once systems are in place to support a remote team, make it a company policy.
4. Optimize the Workplace for Productivity
Optimizing involves both physical and psychological changes to your workplace. The tactics include:
Use Productivity Hacks
The two-minute rule is a great tool you should introduce to the team. The two-minute rule is simple: don’t put off doing anything that will take you two minutes or less. These don’t need to go onto your to-do list since they can be quickly completed. This hack gets your wheels moving and kick starts your day.
Prioritize Movement
Make an effort to increase your levels of physical movement. Add exercise into your day to increase your productivity levels. Add movement with walking meetings, standing desks and group workouts after hours.
Practice movement in how the team approaches work. Never schedule a meeting that doesn't have a clear agenda and outcome. Avoid meetings that are a waste of productive time. Ensure all your meetings accomplish something and move your current workload forward.
Prioritize Health
Start at your desk or workstation. Does it motivate you? Declutter extra papers on your desk and ensure it stays neat. Create a peer-to-peer accountability culture where people encourage each other to be clean. Clean desks are great for preventing dust and for your mental health.
Make it a point to stand more often. Sitting is the new smoking for this generation. Ensure you walk around regularly to stretch your spine and prevent aches and pain. Standing prevents obesity, back pain, diabetes, and cancer.
5. Clear Communication on Performance Expectations
Review how you communicate at the office to know how you can improve. A CRM learning article reveals that 80% of work-related conversations are spent on the problems of the past. This is a culture of blame, and it’s more common than most care to admit. To flip the script, talk about the future, including your expectations of it and how the team can rally together to accomplish them.
Modeling positive communication also creates an environment of high morale. A good practice is to start meetings by stating positive affirmations before diving into problems. Other forms of clear communication include:
Set Clear Performance Metrics
It is easy to hit a target when you know where to aim. Setting achievable goals gives your team a reason to be productive. Setting goals creates intrinsic motivation and builds confidence in your ability to succeed. For every goal you set, offer a measurement system that allows you to track progress.
Goals foster collaboration and teamwork. The team will band together to figure out how to hit the business goals. It creates a consultative culture where your team approaches managers to consult on ideas. Goals allow your team to transcend selfishness and work toward a common good.
Offer Assistance and Open Communication Channels
Don’t fall into the trap of valuing quantity over quality. It demoralizes high achievers since there is no incentive for producing high-quality work. Introduce metrics that acknowledge and reward quality. This will allow you to work with your team to improve their skill levels. A project management tool will be a good companion to your organization.
Open communication works well when you create one-on-one meetings so managers can assist staff in improving. During those meetings, use positive feedback to reinforce what is going well. Keep the negative comments minimal to maintain staff morale.
Increased Productivity is a Group Effort
A productive workplace is possible if you commit to modeling positive company values. It’s a great privilege to lead, and managers should remember that their top priority is being a coach.
When a manager has the correct sources, suppliers and manages logistics, they can focus on relationship building. Productivity is a team sport, after all.
Katrina McKinnon is the Outreach Manager for Alsco NZ. Alsco aims to help create a healthier and safer workplace by providing affordable yet high-quality uniform rental service and hospital-grade first aid solutions.