Winning in the workplace: Tips to improve employee work performance

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Winning in the workplace: Tips to improve employee work performance

By Newwe - Sep 12, 2022

In this article, we will talk about how to effectively improve the work performance of your employee's and how improving your employee performance can accelerate your business growth in buckets.

An organization’s success and its ability to achieve business goals largely depends on its employee performance. Employee's who are highly engaged, motivated, and productive meet their goals within the allocated time (or earlier) and help an organization to accelerate its business growth. As an organization, improving your employee performance enables you to achieve your long-term goals, improves your employee satisfaction, and reduces the workforce attrition rate.

As per Udemy statistics for performance:

• 54% of employee's say they aren't performing as they should
• 20% of employee's are not able to advance their professional development
• 50% of employee's say they are concerned about meeting deadlines and are significantly less productive

What is employee productivity?

Employee productivity is a metric that defines the amount of work (outputs) that are efficiently produced by an employee on a project/task/goal versus a specific period of time to complete the work. Outputs are unique for each enterprise, but inputs or productivity enablers tend to be similar across various enterprises and industries. These inputs accomplish things such as teamwork, timeframe, workflows, efficiency of tools, innovation at work and more.

Newwe’s Employee Productivity platform can help you measure your employee performance.

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Factors that affect employee performance and productivity

1. Distraction & hybrid-remote

The brink of disruption post-pandemic encouraged organizations to make a shift to hybrid-remote work - evolving with their own hybrid work strategy. While this has offered employee's to invest more family time, flexibility with work time, and provided an option for whether to commute to the office or not, there is a little surprise of social distraction such as notifications on phone from family and friends all day and night, unplanned house chores, a distraction from the TV at home and more. This leaves employee's temporarily postponing their work resulting in a lowered performance rate. However, this alone is not a major concern for poor performance, but it may affect in the long run.

Pro tips to limit employee distractions

• The best way to get the most of your employee's work time is to increase the levels of their employee engagement and teamwork.
• Ask your employee's about their passion and relate that with their respective career growth at work. You can monitor the tasks assigned to them, track the progress of assignments and communicate any concerns you might have about their performance. This is like a continuous feedback system.
• Encourage managers and team members to practice effective communication - this will help you gauge employee engagement levels.
• A constant conversation platform like Newwe helps you capitalize on the tools you already have, encourage employee engagement, and empower your employee's to perform their best work by building a sense of cooperation and collaboration.

2. Task Management

Employee's have become siloed and an inequitable threat to organizations for having low productivity. The rise in digital exhaustion caused by ungovernable tasks that were assigned to employee's is one of the primary reasons. Often employee's who are working on bigger projects tend to fall behind schedule if their tasks/projects/goals are not well managed. As an organization, the best thing you could do to ensure your employee's meet deadlines is to split their tasks, align them with milestones and allocate an appropriate time frame for each task.

Pro tips to improve task management

• Allow employee's to segment their workloads into achievable milestones.
• Create a list-view of tasks for the team so that each member in the team has a clear idea about the overall tasks details, such as task assignee, priority, estimated time, and more.
• Allocate enough time for each task and ensure they know exactly what needs to be done.

3. Switch from multi-tasking to single-tasking

It turns out that 98% of the population doesn't multi-task well. As per an article by Executive control of cognitive processes, multi-task can result a 40% reduction in productivity.

Most employee's think they can effortlessly switch between simple tasks such as whipping through their to-dos while parallelly listening to a team discussion on a conference call. This is not effective because by trying to multi-task they are shifting back and forth between the tasks and all of that is not efficient. Newwe presents the work pattern of employee's, tracks time that employee's spend away and their active hours, along with tasks progress – all in a single-view dashboard. So, you know the time that is being spent by each employee on each task and can intervene if any support is needed.

Pro tips that help shift ingrained habits

• Help your employee's to prioritize different projects, and work on each project one at a time rather than multi-tasking simultaneously on different projects.
• Provide constant feedback to help them work more effectively and fast.
• Encourage employee's to say NO to any additional work that may distract them from doing the actual job.

4. Employee flexibility

Employee's want the best of both worlds: nearly three-fourths of employee's say they want flexible remote work options to continue. They want a revised and renewed sense of purpose in their work, want a social connection with workmates, and feel a sense of shared identity while working remotely. If you fall short of understanding what your employee's really want and how they would like to work, you’re putting your business at risk.

In a survey conducted by McKinsey, 40% of employee's said they are at least somewhat likely to quit in the next quarter or two. This trend is not only poised to continue but may get even worse if the employee's are not happy with their work culture or flexibility at work. Some of these factors are causing the “Big Resignation” phenomenon.

In order to retain and attract top talent, you need to invest in a more fulfilling employee experience while meeting their fair demand for flexibility at work. As already existing employee's who pretty much knew about your product/service are a great asset, the company cannot afford to lose talent when questioned about flexibility. While all of this can happen when employers offer flexible options for employee's to master their work time.

Pro tips for mastering time and work management at work

• Give your employee's the schedules that best match their needs and allow them to work from anywhere and a hybrid model should be encouraged.
• Newwe platform manages a broad spectrum of work arrangements for your people, so you do not need to worry about employee's missing their deadlines.
• Offer your employee's flexibility with arrival and departure times if they are working on-site, or else ensure they focus on completing tasks rather than mandating to serve a certain number of hours. However, this feasibility varies from project to project.
• Allow employee's to create a daily schedule and stick to it while offering flexibility with working hours.

5. Measure and evaluate employee performance data

The first step to identifying performance gaps is to understand how your employee's are performing and analyze various performance metrics such as KRAs, NPS, work efficiency, quality of work, training programs, and more. Analyzing these metrics on a regular basis can help you to gather a better understanding of why your employee's aren’t performing.

Pro tips to help employee's perform well

• Focus on employee KPIs that have a direct impact on ROI, and eventually increase ROI through the right KPIs.
• Make business decisions based on data free from assumptions. Choosing the right data to analyze is half the battle. Then combine your business strategy and performance to draw conclusions.

Track employee productivity through a monitoring platform

With a productivity monitoring platform like Newwe in place, organizations can effortlessly track which employee's are performing extremely well. The data can be used to train underperforming employee's while encouraging top performers through rewards and recognition. To ensure your organization is working at peak performance is absolutely important to stay on top of your competition, and a productivity monitoring platform like Newwe is how businesses are giving a cutting-edge through technology and growing exponentially.