The Ultimate Guide to Boosting Employee Efficiency

employee efficiency

Employee efficiency has a positive correlation with the quality and quantity of results that your business produces over time. An inefficient workforce can act as a crutch to productivity and growth. Unfortunately, improvements in this particular business aspect cannot be brute-forced either. You can’t just crack the whip and enforce more hours or greater workloads onto your workforce and expect them to just comply without any issues. Here are six tips on how to boost your employee’s efficiency.

Use a Monitoring System

There are many employee monitoring software programs out there that can help you track and collect useful data, such as how many work hours an employee logs, how he/she is spending that chunk of time, what websites and applications they are using during that time, etcetera. When introducing a monitoring tool of any sort, exercise caution and sensitivity as employees may perceive this as overly controlling or an authoritarian move. Be sure to outline the benefits that such tools provide, including identification and resolution of operational bottlenecks.

Retrain Your Workforce

Invest in your workforce’s skills and growth. Providing them with resource materials and enrolling them in training programs helps your workforce adapt to the constantly changing business landscape and the new challenges that it brings. This is especially true in the field of technology where new programming languages, tools, and systems are designed and improved constantly. For example, you can get your workforce an agile coaching certification to better prepare them for higher-level software projects.

Conduct Regular Performance Reviews

Performance reviews have been used for over a decade now, particularly by growth companies in the tech sector. It allows management to discuss each employee’s strengths and weaknesses, their opinions about the workplace, and goals they can aim towards as they move forward. Start conducting these in-person one-on-one sit-downs with your employees at least once a year. While there is nothing stopping you from dispensing feedback on a daily basis for individual milestones and tasks, it does help to set an official date on your calendar for these sit-downs as it mentally prepares both you and your employees, which yields higher quality information to be exchanged between both parties.

Use Rewards as a Motivational Tool

Monetary rewards, according to research, remain unsurprisingly effective at boosting the motivation and productivity of employees at work. Giving your employees a pay bump, year-end bonuses, and milestone-based gifts will result in greater output over time. That said, you want to be careful about how you wield this tool. If employees become too reliant and fixated on the monetary rewards of their efforts, they can also just start slacking off once said rewards disappear. Start small, such as rewarding your top salesperson of the month with a $100 gift card or a year-end bonus to your software dev team for launching a software product or resolving a bug.

Improve Your Work Environment

Your employees’ work environment plays a huge role in their ability to get work done as well as the quality of work that is done. Sensory experiences and environmental stimuli affect humans in some very profound ways, either consciously or subconsciously. By improving their work environment, you can also improve their ability to focus, solve problems, and deal with stress in a healthy manner. For starters, let in more natural light. Exposure to natural light can help combat anxiety and depression and lower overall stress levels. Other ways to change the work environment for the better include adding real plants, using the right colors, and adding a communal break room.

Pair the Right Tasks With the Right People

This requires an in-depth knowledge of each person under your employ. You need to know what their strengths and weaknesses are, what stress tolerances they have, who they work with best, etcetera. While it’s every employee’s responsibility to take on an assignment that you delegate to them, pairing up the right person with the right task can produce higher quality output.

By following and implementing these efficiency tips, you can transform your employees into a collectively better functioning team. When deciding on what to target and change, it’s best to involve your employees throughout the process. After all, your employees have firsthand experience on business protocols and processes that are ineffective and time-wasting.

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