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According to one study, only 7% of employees feel productive during the course of a working day. If you’re an employer, this is shocking news, as a lack of productivity is definitely bad for business.
That said, you might not know how you can improve the productivity of your employees. Should you encourage employees to take breaks? Is there anything you can buy that’ll improve workplace productivity?
This post will provide you with three work hacks that’ll help improve productivity levels within your workplace. If you find productivity perplexing, these tips will help you become a productivity pro.
Let’s begin!
1. Encourage Everyone to Take Breaks
One of the best ways you can boost productivity in the workplace is by asking everyone to take regular breaks.
Now the frequency of these breaks will be down to the individuals themselves. For instance, some people might find they do well with taking a break every half an hour or so. But others might instead find it’s better for them to take a break every hour. We’re not talking long breaks, just a minute or two to get up and stretch their legs.
You should encourage people to experiment so they can figure out what’s right for them. You might even want to install some software on the computers, that reminds people to take a break.
2. Make Sure Everyone Is Comfortable
If employees aren’t comfortable, there’s a good chance their productivity levels will take a hit.
Now, the way this discomfort manifests will depend on the employee.
Some employees might find that their chairs are giving them back problems. You may even have employees that are experiencing wrist injuries because their desk isn’t set up in an ergonomic manner.
You’ll need to speak to each employee individually so that you can figure out how to make things better for them. In doing so, you’ll achieve a huge jump in productivity across the board, as each employee will be one step closer to peak performance.
3. Review Business Processes
Another way you can boost productivity is by reviewing the processes within your business.
For instance, things might move slowly in your business because employee decisions need to go through many layers of approval. This hurts productivity, as each layer extends the amount of time it takes to execute an idea.
If this issue affects your company, you need to do a cost-benefit analysis and consider whether it might be a good idea to give employees more freedom.
It’s also worth noting that you can improve business processes by making use of specialist software.
Suppose, you have a CRM system that contains calendar data regarding upcoming client meetings.
You may find yourself in a position where you need to copy and paste this information into your iPhone calendar every week.
This, of course, uses up a lot of time and takes you away from doing ‘real’ work. However, you might be able to avoid all this grunt work, if you use a solution like PieSync to automate the process.
Consider reviewing all the manual work you need to do in your business, and then find out if there’s any software that’ll help you complete the task. The software might not provide a perfect solution, but even 10% improvement in productivity can be significant over the course of a year.
Will These Work Hacks Help Your Business?
The work hacks in this post should help improve productivity levels in your workplace. Of course, each workplace is different, and so some of these tips might not work that well.
That’s okay, as you can often learn a lot by just speaking to your employees. They’ll often have some great tips on how you can improve productivity levels.
Improving productivity is a marathon and not a sprint, so don’t expect your numbers to change right away. If you can make consistent changes, each month, your workplace will be a place of productivity one year from now.
Do you have any tips when it comes to improving productivity? Please share your hacks in the comments section!
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