The Top 5 Ways to Boost Employee Productivity
CoAdvantage-Addressing employee productivity in meaningful, useful, and actionable ways is a huge challenge for employers, especially for knowledge-based work that’s hard to translate into clear productivity metrics. Further complicating the question, raw production isn’t everything. As the famous axiom says, “Productivity is getting things done. Effectiveness is getting the right things done.”
But what can employers do to ensure workers can be both more productive and more effective?
1: Hire Better
Suboptimal hiring processes are more common than you’d think. One CareerBuilder survey found that nearly three-quarters (74%) of HR professionals said they’d made a bad hire at some point. And bad hires indisputably impact workforce productivity. If nothing else, bad hires are rarely as productive as they could be individually; and really bad hires can erode the morale, engagement, and productivity of everyone around them too.
Remember the proverb: one bad apple can spoil the bunch. So, one of the best productivity-boosting tactics is to improve the hiring process. Ask for proof or indicators of personal productivity. Ask about this issue when checking with references. Screen candidates better. And if your in-house hiring team needs help from recruitment experts, ask for help. It’s worth any upfront effort to make better hires.
2: Make the Working Environment Better
Making the right hires won’t matter if you can’t retain employees because they’re unhappy, disengaged, or dissatisfied with their work situation. This also means employers need to ensure employee experience is solid. For more guidance, see our article, “How to ‘design’ employee experience.”
3: Make Work Easier
Making it easier for employees to do their jobs also has huge productivity impacts. According to MetLife’s 19th Annual U.S. Employee Benefit Trends Study (2021), employees who say their employers’ benefits communications are easy to understand are 41% more likely to be productive. It’s not likely that benefits communications translate directly into increased productivity. Rather, it’s probably reflective of a third variable: employers taking steps to make it easier on employers to get their work done.
4: Equip Workers Properly
Similarly, this may be why increased efficiency and productivity are the most common benefits of moving core HR into the cloud, according to PwC’s most recent HR Technology survey. Doing so gives workers the tools and equipment they need eliminate menial tasks, streamline workflows, focus on the most essential efforts, and overall facilitate increased productivity.
5: Train Workers Appropriately
Employee training has a role to play here, too. Your employees will not be as productive as they could be if they’re constantly having to figure out how to do something the right way or the best way. Employees have to clearly know what to do and how to do it to be more effective with their time, produce more successful outcomes, and increase total productivity.
CoAdvantage, one of the nation’s largest Professional Employer Organizations (PEOs), helps small to mid-sized companies with HR administration, benefits, payroll, and compliance. To learn more about CoAdvantage’s ability to create a strategic HR function in your business that drives business growth potential, contact us today.