How To Help Your Employees Be More Productive
Your employees are the backbone of your business, so you need to make sure that they're working as hard as you. Here are a few ways you can help your employees be more productive.
Set Expectations
Clear communication skills is one of the most important aspects of a good boss. Make sure all your employees know what is expected from them, and personally set the example of hard work and productivity.
Incentivize
Incentives are one of the fastest ways to motivate your employees. Have regular prizes to motivate individual employees or the whole company. Offering catered breakfasts, an additional day off, an office party, and bonuses for high achievers are all great ways to light a fire under your employees.
Consider Their Health
Illness, the common cold, and allergies all destroy productivity in an office. To avoid falling prey to these common, but insidious problems, change your air filters, buy air purifiers, and plant lots of indoor plants, especially come allergy season.
In the winter months, Seasonal Affective Disorder may have your employees in a slump. Make sure the office is getting lots of sunlight, and encourage your employees to participate in physical activity to elevate their moods.
Assess Your Leadership Team
Finally, you should do a leadership team assessment if you believe that your leadership team is open to constructive feedback. No leadership team can be 100% effective, no matter how much they care about their employees and the company. Leadership team assessments involve third party evaluations of the leadership team by companies like Envision Global Leadership, Inc. to see how effective they are at setting goals for the team, motivating the team, managing groups or specific people, and handling team issues, to mention just a few things. The feedback provided will be more objective than anything your team could come up with on their own, because of the complex dynamics at play between leaders and employees. If you want to help your employees be more productive, perhaps you first need an objective assessment of how employees are reacting to the leadership team, and whether it has to do with their performance.
The reality is that helping employees be more productive is a complex issue. It could involve changes in your management style, shifts within your organization, or even attention to the needs of individuals within the organization. The key is to examine the big and small factors that affect productivity within your sphere of influence and then act on them.