Proven Ways to Improve Business Productivity

Increasing the productivity of your business can help you grow regardless of the type of company you’re running.

For an organization to run smoothly and achieve top results, both employees and management should strive to optimize processes. This includes developing efficient workflows, improving communication, and distributing workload and activities properly to avoid burnout.

Figuring out how to balance all these can have a dramatic effect on business productivity and, as a result, is bound to increase revenue and profitability.

However, to that end, both business owners and their employees should improve their work practices.

Furthermore, management should focus not only on the processes and task organization, but on making employees feel valued and appreciated in the workplace. In addition, the company needs to facilitate their workforce with the tools, technology, and training that allows them to do their job swiftly and hassle-free.

All this may sound like a lot of work for both sides, but it is, indeed, worth it. By boosting business productivity, companies can realize their full potential and explore new development opportunities.

So in this article, we’ll talk about why it is important for businesses to improve productivity, and provide a list of proven ways that will help you do it yourself.

Quick Tips to Improve the Business Productivity Through Management

As mentioned, management plays an important part in successfully increasing business productivity. So we’ll start with some actionable tips on how to boost the performance of your company’s top assets:

1. Start from the Top

Good managers lead by example. To inspire your employees to be more productive and be on board with the improvements and changes you are implementing, management should be the first to adopt them. Furthemore, this way you will have first-hand experience and will be able to help team members with the process.

2. Encourage Employee Input

By being available to your team for questions and suggestions, you can ensure that you make the best out of every process. Your employees may have valuable insights on how to improve their day-to-day and task management efficiency.

On the other hand, failing to listen to them is a missed opportunity to both show them that you value their opinion and professionalism, and improve their productivity.

3. Implement a BPM Tool

Business process management (BPM) tools can greatly benefit your task management strategy and the organization of your business. They increase transparency, reduce blockers and process bottlenecks, and make it easier to follow processes with minimal mistakes.

4. Create Task Workflows

Building workflows for repetitive tasks makes it easier to onboard new additions to your team, as well as increases the efficiency of how your current employees do their job. Furthermore, when people know what is expected of them and exactly how to proceed this reduces stress and improves their confidence. Both of these affect productivity, and should not be taken lightly.

5. Improve Communication

Encouraging people to communicate issues and look for advice when they need it not only promotes a positive work culture, but affects productivity as well. Active workplace communication ensures that everyone is in the loop of processes and reduces lag caused by misunderstandings, personal conflicts, and simply not knowing what to do.

6. Define Timeframes and Deadlines

Set due dates and tell your employees about it. With piling tasks and activities, setting a proper deadline can motivate your employees to work harder and set their priorities straight.

Providing timeframes for task implementation ensures that projects are implemented on time and your business runs smoothly.

Improve the Productivity of Your Employees

Once you have figured out how to increase business productivity and boost efficiency for management, you should focus on doing the same for your workforce.

7. Make a Strategy

Productivity management is not something that you can implement overnight. Furthermore, to achieve success, you need your employees to cooperate and understand the benefits. Therefore, you need to create a strategy and launch a company-wide informational campaign.

The next step is to carry out all necessary training and onboarding, as well as provide enough time for people to get used to the changes.

Make sure to stay available for feedback and address any concerns – changes can be difficult and even threatening. Especially when you automate processes and adopt new technology.

8. Encourage Communication

As mentioned, communication is essential for good productivity. Your employees need to know that your door is always open and that they can turn to their managers when they need assistance or don’t understand what is expected of them.

9. Make Sure Deadlines Are Taken Seriously

Even for long haul or open-ended projects, your employees will work with more inspiration when you set objectives and due dates for them to meet along the way.

10. Encourage Taking Breaks

According to a productivity study, additional short breaks improve concentration, increase wellbeing, and reduce discomfort without decreasing productivity. At the same time, a different research shows that people are actually afraid to take breaks because they don’t want to seem lazy. However, when they are encouraged to take a few minutes off here and there, a staggering 86% of workers report they become more productive and better at their job.

11. Provide a Recreation Area in the Office

Having a gym in your office, or giving your workers a membership to a local gym, can expand activity and profitability. Furthermore, providing access to a lounge area with darts, ping pong, and other indoor games can improve workplace satisfaction and employee well-being. These, in turn, positively affect productivity.

12. Appreciate Good Work

Do not forget to appreciate your employees if you want to improve business productivity. Employees who feel valued are more productive and motivated. You can praise your employees openly during a meeting, provide bonuses, and raises when appropriate.

Furthermore, you can use your website, social media, and company publications (if you have any) to introduce team members and their work in your company.

All in all, If you neglect to reward diligent work, you risk demotivating your employees and even increasing turnover.

13. Try Gamification

Gamifying the business experience is a great way to improve productivity. You can develop achievement dashboards and a point system, and incentivise great performance.

Games make it easier and more pleasant for people to follow rules, implement tasks, and meet deadlines.

Employ Latest Technology

Implementing the latest tools and technology in your company is bound to improve productivity and make it easier for your employees to do their jobs. Furthermore, modern tools enable you to employ a data-driven decision making approach that helps you boost your company’s performance, minimize risks and increase profits.

All in all, technology can benefit any business, reduce the workload of people and increase productivity.

Here are some actionable tips on how to do that:

14. Adopt a Hybrid Approach

Nowadays, even companies that were reluctant about remote work are adopting the hybrid working model. This means that people can choose when to be in the office and when to work from home (or wherever they want to). And this model has been proven to increase productivity and workplace satisfaction.

By providing the tools and tech that enable it (such as powerful laptops and SaaS software), you are making it possible for people to improve their life-work balance, work on the go, and even do last minute tasks when outside the office.

Furthermore, your business will additionally benefit from working with talent from all around the world that you are otherwise unable to attract.

15. Use Automation

Automating mundane processes is one of the easiest and most accessible ways to increase business productivity. Machines can do repetitive tasks, while humans focus on solving more complicated issues and undertaking a more creative approach to their job.

However, when implementing automation, make sure that people don’t feel threatened that this will make their part in the process obsolete.

Furthermore, always provide the necessary training so that your team can explore the full potential of the new tech.

16. Invest in Software and Programs

Whatever is on your employee’s desktop should be accessible on their portable devices as well. This makes for a connected and adaptable workforce. If employees can access projects only at their desk in the office, you miss out on important flexibility that could give them a chance to react to emergencies.

17. Use Cloud-Based Technologies

Moving your business to the cloud makes work easy to share and open from anywhere. People can access their projects and implement tasks wherever they are, without missing a beat.

In addition, it reduces the need for expensive hardware and on-site maintenance, which makes it easier to implement even by companies that are not tech-savvy and don’t have a pro IT team.

18. Collaborative Technology

Collaborative solutions such as Asana and Slack, as well as platforms that allow in-app collaboration such as Zendesk, Hubspot, Marketo, Figma, etc. make it easier for people to follow processes and stay in touch. This helps them better do their job and be more productive.

However, make sure that these types of tools are used to enhance collaboration and communication and not to create distractions.

Bottom Line

Increasing productivity is vital for boosting your revenue and profits. Even companies that are doing great should consider regularly implementing business productivity audits and looking for new ways to improve the way management and employees handle task management.

By following the tips in this article, you can optimize the performance of your workforce and improve results. Tracking KPIs will allow you to see if the efficiency of work processes is becoming better and may give you insight into what works best for you.