Eight Ways to Boost Employee Productivity

Workplace productivity continues to decline—for a number of reasons. Here are simple steps enterprises can take to create a more efficient workforce.

Take a look at the current state of your workflow and determine which processes could be streamlined. To start, look at departments that are consumed by time-intensive, tedious procedures to get a better sense of the daily workflow to help identify the potential problems or processes that should be reorganized. Oftentimes, employees do things a certain way simply because it’s always been done that way. Consider challenging employees to speak up and question the status quo.

While it’s important to define corporate goals, every department will have unique, personalized processes with different issues. After you’ve found something that can be optimized and have set your goals, create a roadmap for improving the process and reassess progress on a regular basis so you can fine-tune and re-engineer the new procedures to ensure employees are benefiting from the updated workflow.

Misconfigured or legacy technology can create its own set of bottlenecks and slow down the flow of information in an organization, ultimately decreasing productivity and profitability. Taking a look at the technology your employees are using on a daily basis can uncover inefficiencies. Once you’ve evaluated your technology environment, look for new solutions to meet your employees’ needs and ensure that they have the right equipment to get the job done efficiently.

When introducing new technology to a workplace, it’s also important that employees are properly trained so it is used to properly. When employees are not confident in using new technology, they waste an exorbitant amount of time trying to answer questions or solve issues. Additionally, they won’t fully understand the added featured and functionalities of the technology, and the tool will not be used to its fullest potential. Without proper training, new technology can be a drain on productivity; therefore, this is a critical step that can’t be overlooked.

When researching and implementing new technology, it’s critical that the employees who will be using it every day are included in all stages of the process. Start by understanding exactly what your employees are looking for and give them a chance to suggest what tools they would find useful. After the initial research stage, give employees a chance to participate in a pilot program that will allow them to use the tool first-hand and provide real-time feedback.

Receiving and evaluating employees’ opinions during the research and implementation phases of new tech tools will give you invaluable feedback. They are the ones who have to understand, like and use the technology day in and day out, so getting their reactions before investing in a solution can help you understand if a new technology will fit within the business workflows. Once the technology is implemented, it’s important to continue to solicit feedback on an ongoing basis so issues can be remedied.

Information on customers, buying decisions and industry trends can help inform future business decisions. Data is the lifeblood of every organization, so it’s important to manage, secure and store that critical information in a universal, secure content management system that is easily accessible for employees. This is to ensure employees are able to find and analyze it easily. By giving employees fast, efficient access to information no matter where they are, work can get done faster and business productivity improves.

Work today is no longer confined to the four walls of an office. Employees are increasingly working on the go, and this trend isn’t going away anytime soon. To keep employees satisfied and productive, it’s important for businesses to find ways to empower their workers to get work done anywhere. Choose from a variety of mobile productivity tools. For example, real estate agents and sales employees spend most of their time outside the office and deal with a number of different vendors and documents throughout the sales cycle. New mobile scanners the size of a rolled up magazine allow them to digitize and route information to the correct vendor, department or employee to keep business moving so productivity doesn’t halt when they don’t have access to the right equipment.