Poor time management skills and insufficient focus on the part of the employees can affect productivity to a great extent. People get distracted, turn a blind eye to the deadlines and suddenly their project is in jeopardy because they have too much on their plate. Then there’s the danger of the work being done sloppily because of the lack of time.
These are all real issues that each business faces, but luckily, you as an employer can influence them and help your employees stay focused and be more productive. With that in mind, here are a few suggestions:
Prioritizing tasks
Most companies are understaffed, meaning that one employee is probably taking on more workload then prescribed. Also, sometimes there is just so much to be done that people tend to prolong completing a task indefinitely until the deadline is just around the corner and that is when panic ensues and stress kicks in.
To help your staff organize the workload better, you can introduce a project management software in which they can enter each task, all the important details about it, as well as deadlines and priority. In this way, they would have a detailed reminder, which means the tasks will be performed with the utmost attention and on time. And last but not least – with less stress for the employee and you as an employer.
Cutting down unproductive time
Breaks from work are necessary – it’s better to allow your employees to take their well-deserved half an hour break and have them work efficiently until the rest of the shift than to have people sitting at their desks unproductively the entire time. To be able to focus more, employees need to take at least short breaks not only to clear their heads but also to stretch their back from sitting for hours.
However, this doesn’t mean that you should be fine with them spending an hour surfing the internet for things which are not related to work or hanging out on their social media profiles. What they do during their break is their own business, but constantly stopping with work to check their Facebook profile will most definitely influence their concentration and performance. What you can do is also introduce a type of monitoring software which will oversee the time an employee spends on each task.
Avoiding distractions
Offices can be places with many distractions – team members discussing something regarding their project, people getting up for a glass of water, colleagues chatting quietly about their weekend plans. Although most of these things should be done in separate rooms, the reality is that you would almost always have somebody murmuring under their breath in your hearing range.
What you can do to help your employees is to remind them that chatting takes place during the break and that for any team discussions, they have a separate room since both activities affect other people’s concentration. Another useful tool you can introduce is the powerful noise canceling headset which can completely cancel the ambient noise. Also, in case you need to communicate with a client in such an environment, the headset can isolate and enhance your speech so that both the speaker and the listener have the experience as if they were speaking face to face in a quiet room.
Rewarding those who stand out
In any office, you have people with different personalities, backgrounds, and skills. Any team needs such a concoction to function optimally, so they can exchange ideas and motivate each other. But this also means that you will have one group of employees who are meticulous, exceptionally hard-working and who do most of the work. And then there are those who contribute significantly less because they get easily distracted and give over control to others.
One way to motivating both types to concentrate and give their best is to introduce a reward system. You can give rewards to the employees who reach a particular goal or to those who are voted most efficient or most collaborative by their colleagues. The reward can range from letting them use your office for a day, to giving them an extra vacation day. Also, don’t forget the power of praise – don’t be shy with your compliments for those who regularly perform their job to the best of their ability, and make sure those words of praise are public.
