Engagement and productivity are closely related. When you are invested in what you are doing, you are much more likely to do it to the best of your ability. You’ll put forth more effort and the results will be visible. But sometimes productivity can decrease and the business suffers. Here are a few things you can do to breathe a renewed sense of purpose into your office or team.
1. Have the right tools
It’s hard to cut grass without some sort of blade. In order to increase productivity, it helps to have the right tools that will enable you to complete tasks to the best of your ability. Something like Engage coworking software can be a one-stop-shop that keeps everyone on the same page while streamlining the tasks of your business, like creating contracts and automating billing.
2. Prioritize
Prioritizing tasks and goals will improve productivity drastically. When you’re clear on what’s most important or what is going to have the biggest impact on your company, you can appropriate the necessary time and effort to those aspects of the business.
3. Schedule breaks
Although downtime may seem counterintuitive to productivity, the two go hand in hand. When breaks are scheduled into the workday, we have the ability to have a moment to ourselves. We can eat, work on a crossword puzzle, spend some time outside or do whatever content us. Giving the mind a chance to unwind and regroup allows it to come back to a particular task with new eyes and renewed purpose.
4. Professional Development Days
Giving your team members the opportunity to stay up to date on their skills and learn new skills that will benefit them in their careers will ultimately benefit your business. Not only are you allowing people to grow, but you are showing that you care about their development and engagement. When your team feels as though you are invested in them, you are more likely to experience greater dedication and loyalty from them. You may even notice a boost in the retention of highly skilled employees.
5. Streamline systems
Make your business more efficient. If there are 3 reports that are filed for the same purpose, reconsider the usefulness of two of them. If the chain of command is extremely complicated and there are five or six people each employee must answer too, things can get really confusing and communication tends to break down and the business suffers. It may seem counterintuitive, but one of the best ways to get a plant to grow is to prune it.
The same holds true in business. Many times the solution to increasing productivity is to take things out rather than bringing things in. Sometimes replacing pieces of the process is necessary. As long as you take a thorough look at your processes and procedures to see what can go, what can change and what needs to stay the same, you can start to implement solutions.
There are a lot of things you can do to increase productivity in your business. Many small adjustments, like a shift in attitude and the way we speak to one another, can have a huge impact on productivity. It may seem like a big undertaking, but it takes more thoughtfulness than action. And always remember that if you are a person in an authoritative position, you set the example for the rest of your team.
