How to Improve Employee Productivity?

Employee productivity is one of the most important factors that make a company successful. An employee who is happy and engaged also brings success to the company.

Every manager wants his/her employees to be engaged and productive. Employee productivity is directly related to how happy and engaged they are. Many managers feel that just a salary increase, semi-annual rewards, or the promise of remote work will suffice to improve employee productivity. But they don’t have to be. There are many other ways to improve employee productivity. So how can leaders and managers improve employee productivity? Here in this article, we have compiled for you how to improve employee efficiency.

What is employee productivity?

Employee productivity is the output of an individual employee in the workplace. An example of an individual employee output is how many tasks each employee involved in a project can complete. If employees that are involved in the project will be more productive, your project also will be more successful. This also applies to the overall success of the company. To know the output of employees is to know the output of the company. This makes it easy to estimate and plan for your company.

How to improve employee productivity?

To improve employee productivity effectively, an accurate analysis of the company will be useful to you. Moreover, employee engagement and motivation are other important factors. A low-motivated employee will be detrimental to productivity. On the other hand, disengaged employees are a total burden for your company. That’s why companies always implement different methods to improve employee efficiency levels. We have listed a few of these methods for you:

Don’t be afraid to delegate

Trying to take full responsibility for the company is both tiring and inefficient. Don’t control even the smallest detail yourself, instead empower your employees. In this way, you can prevent your own waste of time and improve productivity by giving responsibility to employees.

Delegate responsibilities and tasks to your employees. This enables your employees to gain skills that will benefit your company over time. It also allows employees to measure their own skills. You can both prevent your own time loss and improve employee productivity.

If you’re a team leader or manager, focus on the most important tasks and delegate other tasks to those who can best handle them. Delegate a task to someone and specify what your expectations are. With the task management software PeerBie, you can delegate a task to the person you want, determine its importance and specify your expectations by adding them to the description. Moreover, you can add files, images, or locations to these tasks. Afterwards, you can check whether the task is completed or not.

Match tasks to skills

Knowing skills and abilities of your employees is very important to improve their productivity. Which of your employees do tend to more multitasking? Or which employee is more detail-oriented? If you know competencies and abilities of your employees, you can delegate tasks accordingly. In this way, the probability of your employees struggling with given tasks is reduced. Most importantly, the tasks you delegate to your employees based on their skills will automatically improve their productivity.

Communicate effectively

Communication is one of the most important factors for a productive workforce. With the development of technology and especially with the increase of remote working recently, very effective communication tools have emerged. Thanks to these tools, you can communicate with your remote employees very quickly and easily. Managers and team leaders should communicate with their employees regularly and convey their expectations and responsibilities. In this way, they can possess a productive workforce. Positive communications with your employees improve productivity and increase performance.

With PeerBie, you can quickly communicate with your employees. You can set up a video call, send a message or contact your employees directly with a comment. PeerBie sends a notification when you send a message. In this way, it is faster for the other person to be aware of your message.

Keep goals clear and focused (SMART)

Your employees won’t be very productive if they don’t have a focused goal to aim for. If you set goals for your employees that are impossible to achieve and not clearly defined, it will make them more unproductive. Therefore, try to explain your goals and expectations to employees as clearly as possible. One way to do this is to make sure your goals are ‘SMART‘.

Before delegating a task to an employee, evaluate whether the task meets “SMART – specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timely” goals. If not, try to arrange the task to improve the productivity of your employees. Make sure you clearly communicate SMART goals of the task to your employees. In this way, they will clearly understand what a task entails and what is expected from them.

Cut out the excess

If your employees are focused on a larger goal, you shouldn’t keep them busy with unnecessary tasks. Give your employees or team members time to focus on more important and higher priority tasks. You can create this time by cutting out the excess.

With PeerBie, you can review the tasks of your employees and cut out the task that is not very important and not a priority. If s/he needs to prepare a report, you can access it from PeerBie and take that load off your employee. In this way, you can improve employee productivity and enable employees to spend their time on more important tasks.

Train and develop employees

Training and development of your employees play a huge role in their readiness for tasks. If your employees are more prepared for work, they will be more productive. Forcing employees to start their jobs without knowing what they do is highly inefficient. If you don’t want your employees to do the tasks you delegate randomly, it will be helpful to guide them. Teach them the skills that are necessary to do their work and support their development. Employees who understand how to do their work can start completing their tasks on their own after a while.

Employees who do not know how to manage their tasks are one of the main causes of inefficiency. Support employee development after employee training is completed. You can be a mentor for your employees, provide courses, organize training or increase their responsibilities. In this way, your employees can increase their skills and improve their productivity.

Embrace Telecommuting

Many companies or managers do not allow remote work because they think their employees will be unproductive. But when we look at surveys, we see that this assumption is completely wrong. The reason companies don’t allow is that there is no control mechanism at home. In the office, managers have the ability to control each employee and track their work. There are question marks as to whether this will be possible remotely. But research and surveys show that employees who work from home are more productive than those who work in the office. By embracing telecommuting, you can save all that wasted time.

Is it even possible to effectively manage remote teams? Yes, it is possible! With PeerBie, you can track the tasks and work of your employees and easily manage your remote teams. All you have to do is check the dashboard on the homepage. From here you can see who started work, how many hours they worked, and which tasks they completed.

Give each other feedback

If your employees are unaware that they are inefficient, it is very difficult to improve employee productivity. To avoid this, measure the performance of your employees by examining performance reports. Have daily or weekly meetings with your employees and give them feedback on their performance. After reviewing your employees’ performance, make an effort to help them improve their productivity and ask them as well. This feedback doesn’t have to be negative all the time. If your employee has done a good job, you can also give feedback to appreciate it. This will greatly increase employee productivity. You can improve employee productivity not only by giving feedback but also by getting feedback.

So how will you give feedback to remote workers? With the performance management tool PeerBie, you can set up a video call if you are going to give long feedback or leave a comment if you are going to give short and quick feedback. If you’re going to give feedback to an entire team, you can create a team channel and give them feedback through that team channel.

Think of the big picture

Before you decide something is inefficient for your company and employees, you have to take into account that it can be to your advantage in the long run. Keep up with today’s trends and try to adopt them. Give a chance to any productivity software! With PeerBie, you have everything you need to improve employee productivity.