9 Incredible ways to improve employee productivity in 2022

Employee Productivity

9 Incredible ways to improve employee productivity in 2022

By Newwe - Aug 1, 2022

High productivity at the workplace is a sign that your business is financially healthy, and the workforce is happy. Leaders committed to improving their employee productivity in an organization do not necessarily have to approve a big raise, give lavish gifts, or promise to add a new incentive plan. There are practical and effective ways to enhance productivity in your workforce. It starts with identifying the level of your employee engagement. A disengaged employee will act like a drain on companies with excuses, and a loss of commitment to delivering expected results. Whereas engaged employees show up more, stay longer in an organization, and are committed to delivering more productivity.

As per a recent poll from Gallup, it was discovered that only 34% of the U.S. workforce feel engaged at work. Also, a related survey found that some companies are incurring excessive costs by ignoring poor employee productivity and failing to build a healthy company culture. It concludes that actively disengaged employees cost billions each year in lost productivity.

Research states that the best strategy for increasing employee productivity is to provide an opportunity for employees to receive more education or learning and have a clear familiarity with organizational processes followed to be on track once and always. Enabling employees to have the right tools they need to succeed is a great step in increasing employee productivity.

We have witnessed an increase in employee productivity in circumstances that emphasize building relationships and rewarding teamwork. Organizations that lack open communication between managers and employees are bound to have serious consequences such as productivity issues. Every step to encourage employees to collaborate and work as a team with meaningful goals or tasks or objectives for a business can derive better performance and produce higher productivity.

Let us look at some time-tested tips, with proven outcomes to increase adoption of technology, and practices to improve organizational behavioral patterns that boost to achieve improved employee productivity.

1. Strong team

The real competitive advantage in any business is one and only, your ‘people’.

Having a strong team is the key factor that determines the success of your organization. This requires engaging employees, right from the hiring process to throughout their journey. Have people in your organization who can think differently, make innovative ideas, and provide a diverse range of skill sets. A manager’s initiative to promote continuous training and development helps the workforce to stay relevant and tune in to understand that their company appreciates their contribution and strives to help them in their professional and personal growth.

2. Proof of work

As many businesses started working remotely because of the pandemic, employees’ time-tracking and monitoring entered the mainstream. At present, the market is flooded with digital tools that claim to track employee work, productivity, work-in-progress tasks, track attendance, and collect a wide range of activities through proof of work features. Please make sure before implementing any new tool, check your state laws to see what can be and cannot be monitored about employees.

3. Task roadmaps

Measure the amount of work completed plus the quality of the work completed while ensuring these tasks are aligned with your organization’s goals. As an organization, you need to analyze how teams are distributed and their time is utilized, such as time taken to complete tasks, how many tasks do they complete in a day, and so on. You can track several such metrics using automated software or an employee experience platform like Newwe. The platform gives you complete data about tasks, manages them, provide tight integration with other tools and systems used in the organization, and gives useful insights about productive employees, and those that need some training/mentoring, or who need to be aligned for a performance improvement plan.

4. Leverage your data

With technology now you can capture every aspect of your employee's contribution and derive a meaningful insight from the data to reap long-term benefits. You can capture data from every level of your organization – from managers to employees, and help managers use these insights to know employees better and how they operate. Leveraging data-driven decisions will help you to take informed business decisions and reveal how much change in your organization can make a difference and affect the overall productivity of an employee.

5. Organization efficiency

Accelerate manual and repetitive operational activities such as data entry, record keeping, re-authorizing existing content, searching for items, and more through defined workflows. This will have a greater impact on improving the productivity of your team and on the overall efficiency of your organization. Understanding how data passes in your organization, how your remote and hybrid workforce is accessing the data, where it is stored, and how it can be used to scale productivity and business outcomes, result in massive savings for your organization expenses.

6. Enhance employee experience

If you are in a business that is rapidly changing and emerging with innovative technologies, do not be afraid to change. Adopting better technology in the best possible ways become a considerable determinant of productivity. In addition, you can maximize people's engagement and efficiency with tools enabled by Machine Learning (ML), Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Natural Language Processing (NLP). Newwe’s employee experience platform allows your workforce to track KPIs (Key Performance Indicators), set goals or OKRs (Objective Key Requirements), manage time, collect, and share feedback, and get things done in a most efficient way while deriving the sentiment and health of an employee.

7. Recognize and reward employee's

Always addressing employees’ mistakes in their work is not an ideal practice and it could hinder their productivity. A study from Achievers found that 36% of employees felt lack of recognition was the main reason they are considering switching jobs. Appreciating employees for their contribution and encouraging them to get rid of mistakes with a proper plan increases their confidence, brings a sense of responsibility and accountability at work. So, take time to recognize and reward your employees to highlight their achievements and accomplishments. A tool like Newwe can help appreciate and recognize employees for any of their contributions.

8. Discover productivity prime times

Different people at your organization have different productivity prime times – that is knowing when they can be typically at their best. This can help you in facilitating teams with the right workspace that sets everyone to do their best work. Discuss with your teams and make potential changes based on your analysis of individual prime times. Unless your team is required to be available 24x7 for customer support requests, encourage them to limit their exposure to work distractions such as email notifications and more so that they can focus on work.

9. Provide hands-on training

Improve employee knowledge and their performance by providing them with suitable training and development, both professional and personal levels. There are various LMS (Learning Management Systems) software and off-the-shelf curriculum available in the market that provide a wide range of courses and help employees to upgrade their existing skillsets. This gives them an immense opportunity to test their newfound skills.

Conclusion

It is of great difficulty to ascertain a metric to measure employee motivation. The best and genuine way to measure this is to know how employees are really feeling. Conveying that you care, listen and act upon the things that really matter for an employee will help sustain high motivation.

Happy employees are an asset for an organization, and it is essential to keep them happy and always motivated to increase productivity. Listening to your data, using it to gain insights and recognizing your employees for what they do on an individual level and celebrating their personal as well as professional accomplishments assures improving productivity in the workplace.