15+ Ways to Improve Work Performance, Efficiency & Productivity
Improving efficiency either in personal business or as an employee in workplace is very proportional to productivity, higher yields and even better delivery and higher quality of work.
Your productivity in workplace basically gives an impression of your efficiency in doing the work and the mastery of your duties as a worker.
Work efficiency may be evaluated on the basis of your output in a specific time period. Ideally, the productivity of a given worker is assessed relative to an average for all the employees doing the same work.
As a business manager, it’s very important to master how to manage your employees and understand there areas of improvement in order to motivate them, find the best ways to improve there work performance and get the best from them.
It has been generally agreed in the business sphere that the key success of any business organization depends upon the efficiency and in turn, the productivity of its workers, that’s the reason, big firm always value quality human resources.
No matter how much investment you made on material resources, if the human resources are of poor quality, you’ll not get result. So, employee productivity is an important concern for a successful business.
After having a good idea about the productivity, you may have some questions such as: what can a business do to improve its productivity and how do we increase the output per employee in the workplace?
There are numerous and diverse ways you can improve efficiency and also increase productivity depending on your industry, the nature of work, the management practices, financial strength etc.
In which ever way, it’s an important thing to work on improving your yield and it’s therefore more important you find out the challenges of the workers and help in overcoming them but generally, the following are common reasons why productivity is limited.
Time Span to Invest in the Work
There is no doubt about the fact that every good production requires a qualitative time investment into the work field.
There’s no standard on how many minutes you should work or how you do your work but working with dedication, scheduling your work, finding optimal work hour, breaking down tasks would help in getting your work done efficiently, make you leave work on time for other meaningful things and increase your work productivity.
There is no magic to increase your productivity other than spending more quality hours into it. You may not be able to calculate the hours into the work correctly using the standard rule and some researchers have revealed that there are only about 17% people that can estimate the time spent accurately.
However, some time estimation formula and methods are there to let you know about the amount of time to use for daily tasks like in word processing, social media, and email to increase your productivity.
Take a Normal Break to Retain Energy
This is a proven fact that taking breaks at work increases productivity as you’ll be able to work effectively and efficiently. When you rest after some work sessions, your energy level will be boosted or restored for the coming work session.
Thinking of what you can do to be more effective in your job, working on how often you should take breaks without limiting your productivity is very essential.
You can even have 5 minutes mental break for your employees, short break for assessment etc.
You can also read from the benefits of taking break from Courtney Seiter here
You can help yourself to improve your creativity by taking pre-planned and scheduled breaks. While you are taking a habitual break you are actually working with scientific ways to gain the productivity.
Without any break, some of the effects may be that,
- workers will get bored
- You’ll not be able to manage stress effectively
- Your brain will not be able to process informationa excellently when you overwork without time break
- You’ll not be able to manage time and be creative
- If you’re a position to answer queries, you can become more tensed and angry
Self-imposed time setting
Stress is one of the things you should be able to manage effectively to be effective and efficient in your business and need to be controlled early.
However, setting personal deadlines for yourself and sticking to self-imposed timeline could make stress set it and at the same time helpful to get your work completed in the stipulated hours as long as it is convenient.
It is advised to to use this strategy only for open-ended job (job that’s actually never completed) and make realistic self impose deadline on yourself to work along with it, this way, you won’t be struggling with meeting the deadline and imposing heavy stress on yourself.
Manage your meetings well
Do you know that too many meetings are a waste of time, Perhaps, you dont know that not all those excessive meetings at work are actually productive or yielding positive result, therefore, it’s important for managers to cut down on meetings with employees.
If you don’t have to call all employees to the meeting, don’t do. You can just inform others about the outcome of the meeting, while you’ve called only the top managers and officials.
Atlassian opines that the standard office worker roughly spends 31 hours in the unproductive or inefficient meetings every month, therefore, you need to find strategies for reducing these unnecessary meetings.
Before fixing it for the next time, ask yourself if you are able to complete the similar goals in more productive ways like email, web meetings or phone.
Employ standing meetings
Standup meetings don’t have to be daily and you can even make it weekly or better, virtual meetings may be the best practice to ensure you don’t waste time.
The ideas you incorporate into it depends on the leadership, however, it’s a productive way to handle your office meeting in a more scientific way.
You can employ the idea of the standing meeting into your work that evidently results in encouragement to the increased number of groups with an improved group presentation.
Is multitasking good or bad?
Multitasking is common in small scale industries where workers are limited and also in situation where the employees are required to have experience in every department should they be transferred from one Dept to another.
Multitasking is not evil per say, it can help you improve the brain capacity, change the frequencies at which the brain functions, have diverse experience and so on, however, there are reason why it could be bad and make workers to be inefficient in their dealings.
There are studies and statistics that have proven multitasking to be good and otherwise, having negative effects.
However, Psychologists admit the fact that, when we try to engage in numerous tasks simultaneously, there’s more possibility that our productivity will be limited.
Therefore, we should rather attempt to do only a single work at a time to show our expertise and productivity as well as the downsides could be more than any benefits derived from this.
Use technologies wisely
Internet addiction, especially to social networking sites affect productivity. This may be an unexpected “bonus” for your work if you invest the time of facebooking or Candy-Crushing into other productive tasks in the office.
You can make use of that time for creating and sending some emails, to make a list of your daily activities or to-dos, or perform brainstorming.
Quit the illusion notion
You should not nourish the illusion of perfection for your work while you are doing very well. This is the fact that there is no word exist in the world of perfection. So you have to try your best to achieve more and more good result for your job.
Rather than ‘killing’ your time on this fantasy, assess your work with your efforts and skills to move on. One of Akinyande’s popular quotes says, “Don’t see the Best in you, it’ll always make you do better”
Have a workout break
By using your working hours to exercise, it’ll help you to improve your productivity. A study says that you can employ the idea after going to a club or gym.
If possible, try to have a morning or evening walk session during the weekdays.
This process will definitely add an extra power to your working performance. After offering slight pumping to your blood, you could be the man with the things that can bring your focus back to the work.
Be proactive in your job
Don’t waste your productive times after receiving the phone and reading the emails on your computer. Rather try to keep another session to execute such trifle job.
Set a response time for your emails or phone calls, but prevent them from changing the whole structure and look of your whole day.
Turn off Notification
If you are on alert for the incoming phone calls, try to keep the phone set any other side from where you can’t receive it.
If you are one of them who cannot resist the ‘magnetism’ of text notification, email, or voicemail, then you are suggested to put a stop on the notifications. By following this, you can be proactive rather than reactive.
Your Work intervals
Researchers have found that all elite performers of our society, be it chess players, shooters or athletes work during their intervals.
They stop in exact 90 minutes to be more productive as compared to the employees who intend to extend it.
They also established the fact that the top working subjects does rarely work more than 4 and half hours in a day.
Give some time to beautify yourself
This may appear very odd to you but this is a fact that an aesthetic presentation of your working place is going to boost your performance in future. A few of the studies show that the decorative outfitting or visually pleasing components like decorative wall panels.
Reduce interruptions
This may seem simple when you try to execute the tip. When you are much involved in your work, an interruption of your colleagues in just a moment may affect your concentrations negatively.
Now you are bound to refocus on it after an interval. This is very time consuming and demands an effort to get it back, so, try to reduce all kind of interruptions of your surroundings to get an effective productivity.
Decorative workspace is essential
Psychologically, this is a proven fact that when you’re in a colorful and beautiful environment, you can recreate more.
As a business administrator, you can apply this idea in your workplace and equip your employees’ offices with decorative accessories to fascinate them into using it and to even create an avenue for relaxation.
You can use the 3D wall panels to give a vibrant and modern look to their office wall. This decorative wall panels are easily available in the market and also easy to install in the natural flow of the office.
When your aim is to get an improved productivity from your workers, you can use sigh kind of wall paneling.
Plants can can help in your productivity. So try to get a live setting in your office space with candles, artworks, 3D wall panels, and flowers.
