As an employer, one of your biggest challenges is ensuring your team is able to work as efficiently as possible. They only have eight hours a day in the office on average, so you need to set them up to be as productive as possible in this limited time.
But being a good boss is not about squeezing as much labour as possible from your workforce. This mindset will lead to unhappy staff, poor quality work, and a high employee turnover. You also have a responsibility to ensure your staff are happy and look after their mental and physical health.
So how can you maximize the productivity of employees without sacrificing their quality of life? There are several ways you can nurture a high-functioning, happy team, and here are four tips to get you started.
Create a positive work environment
A happy employee is a productive employee, a fact that has been proven by several workplace studies. Creating a positive work environment, in which your team feel comfortable and valued, will enable you to get the most out of your staff while simultaneously being respected and liked by your employees. There are several ways to create an office that people look forward to entering each morning, but the best way to go about this is to listen to your staff and ask them what could be improved about their environment. Small gestures like providing tea, coffee, snacks and other refreshments can make a big difference to people’s happiness, as well as aesthetically pleasing items like plants and artwork. Encourage socialising within the team, and schedule extracurricular activities like dinner and drinks on a Friday evening or fun activities like bowling and escape rooms. During these pandemic times, it’s equally important to keep your employees as safe as possible. Employees who feel that their employer is taking all possible steps to protect them from COVID-19 are more likely to feel happy and productive. Providing onsite employee coronavirus testing in Los Angeles can help prevent an outbreak at your office since tests can help break the chain of virus transmission.
Supercharge human resources
Human resources is the department of a company tasked with hiring employees and ensuring they are happy and productive. Depending on the size of your business, this might be a specific team, or it might simply fall under your own responsibilities as a manager. The most important of your human resource planning objectives is to maximise your employees, who are your business’s most valuable asset. This starts at the hiring process. By being more careful at the recruitment stage, you can find the perfect employees for your company and assign them to the roles where they can make the best use of their skills. There are plenty of human resources management tools and strategies that can transform your business, so consider the benefits of adopting new organizational structures and ways of working.
Optimise meetings
Meetings are one of the biggest productivity black holes in any business. Although they are always scheduled with good intentions, they end up being padded with small talk and repetition with only a small amount of real substance. Optimize your meetings by shortening them and reducing the quantity. This way, you and your employees will be more pressed to make better use of the limited time and will get more done before returning to your desks.
Embrace flexible working patterns
The traditional nine-to-five working structure is a thing of the past. With advances in collaboration technology and the challenges posed by the global pandemic, more and more companies are embracing flexible working as the new norm. Hybrid working has gained traction as a way of optimising productivity and employee satisfaction by allowing staff to divide their time between the office and their homes. As a manager, you need to accept the way the business landscape is going and be forward-thinking. Allow your staff to have more say over their own working patterns. This doesn’t mean you need to pack up your office and let everyone work permanently from home, but you could start with small steps. Allow people to choose their hours, allowing them more flexibility in their lives to attend to personal matters like childcare and medical appointments.
As long as you have adequate collaboration technology in place, there is no reason why a team that works from home should be a barrier to success. They will be happier, with better mental health, and will therefore enjoy their job more and want to work harder. You can still check in with them remotely and have them come into the office occasionally. Before long, you will realise that this truly is the future of the workplace.
In conclusion, if you want your employees to be more productive, you need to look after them and value them as human beings. Give them more control over their working patterns and strive to make their workplace a positive, social environment.
