Six Management Practices That Can Boost Employee Productivity

Close your eyes and imagine a world where all your employees could work at their full performance capacity, for every minute of every day. A world where your staff don’t steal glances at the clock every minute, and where they aren't taking their 10th coffee break within the hour.

Here are six tips to help boost employee productivity:

Understand your employee

Why is it they come to work? How should you communicate with them? Do they like to receive praise publicly or privately? How do they like to be rewarded, and how do they respond best to feedback? Understanding your employees on a more personal level means that you can cater tasks, feedback and incentives to boost their morale and improve their productivity

Carefully structured incentives 

As a general rule of thumb, a manager or director of a company shouldn’t expect an employee to work for the sole success of the enterprise. Employees may come for social gratification, financial stability, and a whole host of other reasons. When a task is seen to solely benefit senior levels, it will see junior level staff becoming unmotivated to reach the same goals to the best of their abilities. Employees must see worthy and valuable benefits and rewards of completing goals. This means that management should conduct motivation tests to understand the drive behind why employees come to work every day, and reward the team equal to their contribution and according to their desires.

Constantly providing meaningful and constructive feedback

Feedback systems should be implemented, and performance evaluation tests should be regularly conducted to identify talent gaps or to identify where employees excel.

Adequate training

From conducting feedback tests, management should employ talent management tools to improve staff in required areas. Employees who receive complimentary courses or trainings will feel that management is invested in their success and talent – whilst management benefits through their improved skill set and morale.

Personalising the job

Employees all work in different ways – and giving individuals the wrong tools can often cause them to work slowly and more unproductively. Allowing employees’ flexibility in how and when they work – providing that they have a good record of meeting deadlines – can allow them to work at a pace and in a way that is beneficial to both them and the company.

Give credit where it is due

Recognition reinforces good behavior, and allows the employee to realize that their good work has not gone unnoticed. Managers should assume that employees do not realise that they’re doing a good job, and give recognition to show their appreciation for the workers’ efforts.

Performance capacity is largely dictated by management practices, and a manager’s ability to maintain a constant level of motivation through the implementation of performance management activities. So what can you do to boost your employees’ performance?

Boosting employee productivity is not as simple as throwing around some cash. It grows from monitoring and improving your workplace through to understanding the employees, and allowing them to feel the benefits of their hard work. The employees should feel as if they are a valued member of the team.

Tools such as job satisfaction surveys can help you understand your employees, as well as identify what may need changing in your workplace. For more information on job satisfaction surveys, please visit the Psych Press webpage: http://psychpress.com.au/psychometric/talent-retain.asp?job-satisfaction-survey

Managing vs. Leading - Finding a Balance

There are important differences between managing your team and leading them.  Leading includes the ability to develop, motivate and challenge the group while trusting their ability and working along them side-by-side.  Managing on the other hand includes maintaining group dynamics, operations and all necessary delegation, and whilst it doesn’t touch on the ‘inspiring’ side of working with others it relates to the necessary ‘getting things done’ aspect of work life.

The following suggestions can help you become an effective ‘Leading Manager’

Share your vision

Make it a frequent habit to tell your team how their contributions and performance align with the organisation’s goals. Invest in learning about what your team would like to achieve in their career and current role. Link this information to current challenges and tasks they are responsible for. Offer them the chance to step-up and exceed expectations for the benefit of the company but more importantly, themselves. This won’t only benefit their motivation to align their interests with yours but will give you a team that is more focused on achieving long term goals.

DON’T FORGET: Be honest, staff can sniff out when you’re pretending to care about their goals from a mile away. If your immediate needs don’t relate to them straight away, be sure that it is going somewhere in the long run and communicate the process clearly to your team, and don’t remove yourself from the discussion or the process itself.

Delegate to develop

Allow your team the freedom to prove themselves by delegating challenging tasks and responsibilities.  Clearly state the goal of the task and trust that they will deliver. While monitoring your team’s progress is important, avoid micromanaging as this will not contribute to their overall development. It is important that you remain open for questions and lead by example. Ensure that the area you are developing them in is consistent with the company’s long term goals.

DON’T FORGET: Team differently experienced staff members in similar roles together for new projects. This will give more experienced staff a chance to learn effective delegation and communication, whilst less experienced staff have a chance to learn alongside those who are in positions they would like to reach. Give them clear goals that they should achieve with the other, and a chance to create their own objectives.

Empower and Reward

As your staff become more adept at certain tasks they should also become more responsible for the task’s development, improvement and management. If you can motivate your staff to ‘take control’ of their own performance in certain areas they will feel more confident in creating and measuring their outcomes to report back to you. This also gives them the feeling that they should be learning new ideas and techniques that add value to the task, their expertise and of course your business.

Reward plays an important part in empowering staff. If staff exceeded expectations, let them know that this could lead to new tasks and responsibilities for them, and explain how this impacts the company's opportunities as a whole. Make sure all staff are aware of the achievements and are all a part of the success.

Remember, operationalising and delegating tasks are important practices to grasp for any leader. You can’t always be the ‘good guy,’ but you definitely can add leadership strategies into everything you do to make sure you, the team and the business can continuously head in the right direction!