Every employee is a cost to the company. Many companies make the mistake of determining the cost of employees by the talent they possess. They fix the focus of this cost on productivity; emphasizing on making employees work harder, keeping them engaged, and tracking and monitoring their activities. But it is not the true method to measure and improve productivity, nor to balance the cost-benefit ratio.
The secret to greater productivity is better planning, effective management, streamlined operations, and solid reward, recognition, and compensation programs. Apparently, the cost of employee productivity is distributed—to every process in the operations. Unless you have the visibility into the processes to make the best decision for the team, it is difficult to maximize the productivity and enable the team to work at their full potential.
From this perspective, here are a few aspects that you need to work up to improve the employee productivity levels in your organization. The problem is it needs major workplace changes to optimize the productivity levels, which at some point gets easy, while at other is extremely difficult.
Let us start with the toughest one!
The Ugly: Patch or Replace
What aspect of your operations need complete transformation?
Where are the gaps in the process?
What are the clear indicators of profit leakages?
These are a few critical questions that you need to answer before your venture out to improve employee productivity. If you do not know whether to patch the processes or replace it with a new one, you may not be able to make significant improvements in productivity. For example, if your existing workforce management software is inefficient to track the right productivity metrics and provide you deeper visibility into employee activity, you might want to replace it with a new software.
Similarly, you could measure the productivity levels of employees in a time-bound manner to see if proper training could help them improve their skills or you need to create a new hiring strategy to combat the productivity challenges.
These decisions are costly and impact the whole operations, including how your teams work, which make them the ugliest part of the employee productivity.
The Bad: The Need for Massive Workplace Optimization
Workplace impact on productivity is deep-rooted. Only an acute examination of the workplace could lead you to the gaps. Another aspect of workplace productivity is the work culture that often creates major challenges for the leadership teams.
The problem with the work culture is a consistent conflict between an ideal workplace—one that the management and leaders team wants to build and the other that employees want. For instance, employees want more flexibility and discretion at work, but sometimes management teams do not have the processes and tools in place to increase workplace productivity and autonomy.
Consider these statistics for example:
- 71% of professionals expressed that listening to music makes them more productive, according to the survey by Accountemps, a division of global staffing firm Robert Half.
- 53% of respondents asserted that a cold work environment leads to drop in productivity in a survey conducted by CareerBuilder study.
- A study by Remote Collaborative Worker Survey by CoSo Cloud reveals that 77% of employees report higher productivity while working from remote locations.
These findings bring the spotlight on what employees want when it comes to work culture. However, most of these surveys have been conducted in an office environment. If you have field teams, flexibility at work would mean proper scheduling and field service dispatch processes, proper connectivity with back-office, and enhanced reporting and analytics capabilities to make best decisions on the spot.
In both the cases, you might need a massive workplace optimization to ensure that your office teams and fieldforce are operating at their full potential. The optimization includes automated workflow, shorter response cycle, and greater decision-making support.
The Good: The road to profitability
High productivity is interlinked with the road to greater profitability. The good news is it is achievable in a short span of time, with smaller to greater changes in the operations.
As in even small changes in how the teams work could lead to significant improvements in the employee productivity. Here are a few ways you could maximize productivity and become more transparent and profitable.
- Use effective communication and collaboration tools to reduce the response time and bring speed into the processes.
- Enhance your reporting capabilities to increase transparency and accountability. It would allow you to let your team work at remote locations with full responsibility for the task.
- Allow flexible schedules, make use of technology such as field service management software to track and monitor the field activities of your teams, and based on the data, reward and recognize the efforts to boost their morale.
- Build a culture of training and development within the team to upskill and reskill your team.
The Final Thought
Your organization is what your team is. Every aspect of operations from productivity to profitability largely depends on how empowered your team is to carry out the operations. And that makes you all the way more responsible for employee enablement for higher productivity. About Author: Suyash is a customer experience manager at FieldCircle, a field service technology company. A writer by heart, he loves to spread the word around how customers interact with business across channels and the role of next-generation technology in customer experience and business success.
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