Hiring employees that you believe will be productive is a great thing, but as time passes, productivity is impacted by many factors. The ugly truth is, most employees waste hours during work, and surveys even confirm this.
As a business owner or a manager trying to enhance your employee productivity. You can certainly allow them the flexibility they need and listen directly from them for what would help them. However, you can also consider things that you do that can be wasting their time.
Here are 5 things that you can be doing, that can be making your employees less productive.
Over prioritizing office presence
Some managers and business owners believe that the way to improve the productivity of employees is by letting them stay longer at the office. Many employees stay for unpaid hours weekly, whether because of obligations or just to impress their managers.
That is one of the biggest mistakes made by business owners and managers that you should avoid. It is called presenteeism, defining when employees’ work is evaluated by their presence at the office.
Human brains have limits. The truth is that you can make work done and employees impressed by focusing on improving the quality of the working hours of your employees, and not the quality of these hours.
Researchers confirm that employees who work less days and hours become more productive, which honestly seems logical, as less higher quality hours can definitely make sense for every one of us.
Not establishing a break culture
Enforcing employees to work for continuous 8 hours, or more clearly, trying to do so, is not any good practice. Nobody works that much continuously and you need to admit it.
Establishing a break culture and encouraging them to short breaks regularly can have a positive impact their productivity. You also need to offer them one big break during the day at least.
Making inefficient meetings
Over-communication is very bad for your employees productivity. Whether it is between employees and managers or employees and each other.
Long meetings can be one sort of over-communication you need to avoid. Each meeting should have an agenda and clear timeframe, and it needs to be as efficient as possible.
Making all work days identical
When you treat all workdays as if they are typical days, that doesn’t make them 5 identical productive days. Making the last day of the week, a half working day, or letting them leave early can be a great thing to do.
Research confirms that the last working day is always the day when employees have the least productivity and waste much time. Boosting their morale with a little early allowance to leave is the least good thing you can do to solve this.
Not incentivising your people
Incentivising your people is always your responsibility. You should know that the normal thing is that they will become demotivated and need motivation.
Be it in the form of letting them rest, giving them flexibility or offering them bonuses. You need to invest in making your employees motivated. You can even get feedback on what motivates them directly from them, then you can start to do what you can.
