Wasted employee productivity is detrimental to the long-term success of your business. As a business owner or a manager wasted productivity, from even one employee, can hurt your business. Here are seven productivity traps you need to avoid:
1. Too Much Structure
Creating a roadmap of procedures and processes helps maintain a consistent workflow. However, being too rigid in that structure is a productivity disaster. Your employees are only human and need room to adapt the processes. As an employer, allowing your staff to have some flexibility improves internal motivation and gives a sense of empowerment, allowing your employees’ personal creativity and productivity to flourish.
2. Ignoring the Big Picture
Your business has a lot of moving parts and each employee was hired to perform a specific role to keep it running smoothly. While keeping up with the tasks they were hired for is a top priority, keeping them informed about strategic projects is a productivity essential. Details are important, but sharing your vision for how all the parts work together stresses the importance of their individual efforts. When an employee sees that their work matters, they are more likely to contribute more effort. (For more, see: Asset Protection for the Business Owner.)
3. Prohibiting Process Changes
Why are your business tasks done a certain way? If the answer is “because that’s the way we’ve always done it,” you could be in trouble. With the changing times, advances in technology and staff turnover, the way you’ve always done it could be sapping your productivity without you even knowing.
Encourage input from your employees on changes to enhance the workflow. From something as simple as moving the copy machine to another part of the office to major process adaptations, you need to know when to let go of outdated practices to improve workflows and enhance productivity.
4. Restricting Time Off
While it might seem counterproductive, stepping away from our work actually increases productivity. It’s because our brains operate on limited cognitive “bandwidth” and productivity suffers when employees are mentally overclocked.
Though you don’t have much control over increasing the working hours in a day, you can increase the amount of energy your employees are able to expend on their tasks simply by encouraging them to take regular breaks while at work. Break time is not wasted time. A well-timed break replenishes valuable resources that allow your staff to stay on task, be attentive and solve problems.
5. No Accountability
As a business owner, you’re no stranger to accountability. After all, your success to this point has largely hinged on your ability to keep yourself on track. What you may not realize, however, is that not stressing accountability among your staff reduces both their motivation their productivity.
What’s worse, a lack of accountability also reduces employee morale. When morale is low, your staff loses trust in each other and in you. Keep your staff accountable by creating guidelines to monitor their productivity. Encourage weekly goals and deliverables and, most importantly, make sure you’re leading by example.
6. Micromanaging
The most important skill for increasing employee productivity is a hands-off approach to management. Taking a step back and allowing your staff to operate independently of your control introduces autonomy to the workday. People are more motivated by autonomy than by financial rewards and managing less will deliver better results.
The key to letting go is trusting your employees to manage day-to-day operations and, rather than trying to do it for them, offer to coach them as needed. While this is especially difficult if you’re a detail person, there is great benefit when you reorient your focus to a more strategic approach. When you trust your staff to do the job you hired them to do, their productivity will soar.
7. No Financial Plan
Preparing your business for future growth and development requires a strong financial plan. Without it, you’re likely to lack direction and feel an overwhelming amount of stress as you contemplate what your future might look like. With stress being one of the biggest deterrents to effective leadership, how are you supposed to lead and manage your staff when you lack focus and direction?
Productivity Boosts Your Bottom Line
A 2014 survey by Salary.com found that 69% of employees admit to wasting up to an hour of work each day. That can add up to more than 250 hours a year of wasted productivity from a single employee. Employees are complex people, and creating a work environment that encourages them to perform well is key to your success. If you trust them to do the job you hired them for and develop for yourself a strategic focus through avoiding these common productivity restraints, you’re more likely to boost employee productivity and enjoy increased profit and improved performance for years to come.
Your employees expect you to have a plan for your business - one that extends far into the future and provides them with job security. Creating a plan for business development and coordinating your personal finances with your business finances, will give you confidence in the future of your company. Your confidence will spill over to your employees, giving them a boost that may result in increased productivity. (For more from this author, see: How Small Business Owners Can Create Cash Flow.)
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cr. https://www.investopedia.com/advisor-network/articles/7-ways-you-are-preventing-employee-productivity/
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