A productive employee is a gift to your company. Imagine if your entire workforce maximises their time to meet deadlines and produce quality outputs. It’ll result in happy customers, better prospects and company growth.
In an ideal world, all you need to do is to hire talented people. Reality doesn’t offer that convenience, though. Many factors affect your employees’ productivity, and some of them are out of your reach.
Surprisingly, those within your control that make a significant impact on productivity don’t involve benefits and salaries.
How Does Your Office Look?
Offices have evolved from cubicle farms to open spaces that even include ping pong tables. It’s a drastic change driven by the increasing need for employees to feel safe and comfortable in their workplace.
Before you revamp your entire office in Singapore to match Google’s jaw-dropping interior, identify specific concerns. An interior design firm can assist you, whether you feel there’s a greater demand for collaboration, creativity or privacy.
While open spaces look nice, they’re not for every person and company. You’ll have people performing tasks that need more privacy than others. It helps to plan how you’ll handle that. Other factors that you’ll need to consider are lighting, colours and function. Even a small office can incorporate significant changes to encourage better productivity.
What Technology Do You Use?
Introducing collaboration technology to your workplace saves time and effort. It decreases face-to-face interaction and gives your employees more time to handle their priorities. It simplifies communication when you have one place where everybody can check the minutes of a meeting or post announcements.
Technology also improves the organisation of tasks, projects and information. It simplifies the encoding and retrieval of these things for different people’s use.
An organised system reduces employee stress, too. In a demanding workplace with mountains of work to finish, the last thing anyone wants is an hour-long search for a single document.
Don’t be afraid to go through a trial-and-error phase to see which software and management app works for your team. Once you pick a program or app, be sure to release a set of guidelines for proper usage. You’ll find work will go more smoothly when you use the appropriate technology.
Do You Listen to Music?
Listening to music makes it easy for some employees to complete repetitive tasks. It’s especially important for desk jockeys who have few reasons to roam around. Music can improve their mood, which, in turn, boosts their performance.
Allowing this practice in your office is more affordable than giving each one a limitless supply of coffee and Cinnabon. Studies have shown that tuning in to music you like can release dopamine the same way eating food can.
Improved concentration is another advantage of letting your employees plug in their earphones. Music blocks out noise, which can be loud and many in an open office. When someone is wearing their headsets, it’s less likely for a colleague to interrupt them for a trivial matter. Who wants to disturb someone whose face is inches away from the screen in pure concentration, right?
The methods to increase employee productivity differs for each kind of business. Before making any drastic change, consider calling a meeting or conducting a survey. It’s your employees who will tell you best how you can help them improve their performance.
