6 Fast and Easy Ways to Improve Work Performance

How productive is your business?

A common way to measure organizational productivity is to look at your bottom line. If revenues are growing year over year, you can conclude that your company is productive.

However, that’s a simplistic way of measuring productivity. You need to evaluate the rate of output per unit. In this context, a unit is an employee.

Are your employees putting out more quality work within a defined timeframe? Is it taking them longer to complete a task that should be taking a few minutes?

If yes, you need to know how to improve work performance. Continue reading for more insight.

1. Find Out Why Performance Is Low

To fix something that’s broken, you must start by finding out the broken part, right?

Similarly, to improve the performance of your employees, you need to begin by establishing why they aren’t performing to your company’s expectations. Once you have this information, it’s easy to implement effective performance improvement measures.

So, how do you gather this information?

If yours is a medium-sized or large organization with several employees, it can be difficult to pinpoint the problem, right?

In this case, what you need to do is to run a survey. Issue questionnaires that enable employees to provide anonymous feedback on the challenges they’re facing. You can also ask them to provide suggestions on what the organization can do to improve their productivity.

2. Assess the Workload Per Employee

Sometimes productivity suffers not becomes an employee is incompetent, but because they simply have too much work to do within a short time.

This is why you need to evaluate the workload of each of your employees and determine whether it’s within their capabilities. If it’s too much for them to handle, an obvious solution is to reduce it.

Another option is to hire more employees and split the workload among them. Of course, a larger team is be suited to complete the work faster and improve the overall productivity of your company.

3. Create Organizational Policies That Boost Employee Productivity

Did you know your organizational policies could be harming your employees’ productivity levels?

For example, let’s say your company doesn’t prohibit employees from using social media during work hours. This isn’t a bad thing, especially if your organizational culture is “fun and hippy.”

However, this policy could be doing more harm than good. Social media is a major distractor for anyone, so if your employees are working while chatting with their friends on social media, their productivity will certainly take a hit.

The gist of this is you need to develop organization policies that boost employee productivity. Banning or minimizing access to things that distract your employees is a good place to start.

You can also allow them to take frequent breaks. Studies show a strong correlation between more breaks and improved productivity.

4. Ensure Office Environment Promotes Productivity

Ever walked into an office that looked so cluttered you wondered how anybody gets anything done? You definitely wouldn’t fancy working there.

Now that you’re an employer, it’s your responsibility to provide an office environment that promotes employee wellness and boosts productivity.

There’s a lot you can do to create an office space your employees will love.

To start with, there should be plenty of natural light. This means windows should be large and exposed to sunlight.

According to neuroscience research, people who work in an office that receives 173 percent more exposure to sunlight enjoy at least 46 more minutes of sleep every night. A well-rested employee will come to work energized and ready to crush the day’s goals.

Ergonomic workstations also play an important role in improving employee productivity. Other office design ideas to implement include creating collaboration spaces and bringing in office plants.

Tweaking office design might not look like a fast and easy way to improve work performance, but it is. All you need to do is hire an office designer to implement these changes.

5. Provide Efficient Work Tools and Equipment

Do you use a legacy computer in your office? Certainly not.

Therefore, you have no reason to let your workers use legacy or outdated tools and systems to do their work. These will only slow them down, no matter how hard they try to get things done faster.

If your company still has old computers and other pieces of office devices that look like they belong in a museum, you ought to invest in more advanced and efficient technology.

While at it, be sure to automate as many functions as you can. With a good enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, automating business functions with an aim to improve productivity is now an easy job. Try it!

6. Train Your Employees

You can provide your employees with the latest tools and equipment and base them in fancy offices, but if they don’t have the right occupation skills, their work performance will suffer.

To solve this problem, train your employees regularly.

A mistake some employers make is assuming that just because they hired qualified employees, they don’t need to invest in additional training programs. Don’t make this mistake.

As technology changes, so do your employees’ roles and responsibilities. They need to continually update their skills and knowledge in order to remain competitive.

Take the initiative and enroll them in occupational training programs.

Improve Work Performance the Easy Way

As an employer, no one cares about the performance of your company more than you do. And to achieve higher organizational productivity, your employees need to step up. With this guide on how to improve work performance, you now have the information you need to implement changes that will yield fast, positive results.

Stay tuned to our blog for business and workplace tips and insights.