In this article, you’ll discover 35 striking ways, strategies and techniques on how to Increase workplace productivity for small business owners.
Productivity is a vital requirement to keep small, medium and big business owners at profit.
Hence, without productivity, their will be no progress for all class of business owners irrespective of their target markets.
That is to say, big, medium and small business owners will not fully maximize their business potentials without improving on productivity.
On the other hand, we can also say lack of workplace productivity is the direct product of workplace stress.
One of the major differences between the rich and the poor is that rich people know the importance of being productive, hence they will do all it takes to stay productive at work.
Therefore, knowing how to improve productivity in your workplace is vital for small and big business owners.
Table of Contents
What is workplace productivity:
Workplace productivity is the rate and measure at which work is being carried out in a workplace.
It’s a measure that checks how fast progress is made with respect to time.
It also checks the competency, accuracy and speed of workers to determine how quick business tasks are carried out.
Therefore, workplace productivity is vital to increase worker’s morale and encourage them to put in their best at all times.
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How does workplace productivity help to promote small business owners:
Small business owners with a limited number of working employees needs an improved workplace productivity in many ways, however, lets list the most important ways
- It boost employees morale and willingness to work among workers.
- A productive workplace helps to increase profits and reduce losses for big, medium and small business owners.
- It gives business owners the morale to build their businesses to greater heights.
How to Increase workplace productivity in 35 good ways:
1. Set real goals and share it with your employees:
One of the fastest ways to increase workplace productivity is to set clear goal, make them real and share it across to every member of your business.
People work better when they know what the goal is
ELON MUSK CEO TESLA CARS AND SPACE X
Make sure your goals are highly realistic, set short-term and long term goals.
It’s common sense that people are always motivated to put in their best at any activity when they already know what they intend to achieve.
Apply this tips in your business and you’re sure to record ground breaking business growth.
Therefore, the importance of goal setting can never be outdated.
2. Make sure your rules are clear enough:
Imagine what life would have been like if their was no rules and people can do just anything they want to do without anybody questioning their actions?
There would be so much disorder. That’s exactly how it is to live without rules.
So if your business has no rules and regulations, employees might not know what exactly affects the growth of your business and what promotes it.
3. Encourage division of labor:
Drop the one man business mentality, it slows down productivity of workers.
Allowing one person to do all the job will create unnecessary fatigue and stress him out.
It’s easier for 10 men to load 20 trucks of carton milk from a warehouse than for 1 man to load 2 trucks from the same warehouse.
The 20 men can easily transfer those cartons standing at different strategic positions without moving an inch, yet they will get the job done successfully with less fatigue.
Whereas, the other man will have to go into the warehouse to get each cartons before moving it back to the truck, which becomes stressful and time wasting.
This also explains why we have goal keepers, defenders, midfielders and strikers in every football game.
When you encourage division of labor in your workplace, it promotes unity and increases productivity.
Hence, workers will feel as one family at work, which will get them more involved in the daily business operations.
4. Giving incentive to workers increases workplace productivity:
Workers should be encouraged to keep up their productivity. Hence one way to do that is to give incentive to workers, give bonuses and add more tips to keep workers motivated.
This reminds your workers that you see their input irrespective of the value of incentive you gave them.
Worker who won incentives will keep doing well to get more incentives and others will also sit-up to qualify for incentives, hence increasing workplace productivity.
5. Use the best tools and mediums to carry out each task:
The tools and medium of work we choose will have a direct impact on the outcome of our job.
It’s good you always use the best tools and medium of work, use the best methods and check out how fast and successful your work will become.
Productivity is never an accident, it is always the result of commitment to excellence, intelligent planning and focused effort.
Paul J. Meyer
6. Organize meetings to hear the challenges of workers and improve on them:
You never can tell the challenges of being an employee.
Hence, it’s advised you organize meetings, listen to the challenges encountered by your sales team, your marketing team and customer services.
Pay attention to those challenges and find solutions to them. This will boost their confidence to keep on with their task.
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7. Eliminates delays in carrying out task:
Encourage workers to eliminating delays while at work.
It is a wise idea to list the most important jobs and design an expected execution time to them.
Assigning time limit to jobs will make you faster, Hence promoting urgency amongst workers.
Therefore, don’t just get busy with any task, be productive at it.
Focus on being productive instead of being busy.
TIM FERRIS
8. Promote urgency in your workplace:
Speed increases workplace productivity.
If you will do something in 2 hours time, why not do it now. Hence, your next two hours can be productivity used for other important stuffs.
Staying too long on any task might also lead to workplace stress, so urgency is important.
Therefore, encourage urgency in your workplace.
It helps to eliminate procrastination and increases the speed of execution.
9. Don’t multitask and overload workers:
One way to kill workplace productivity is to multitask and overload workers.
Firstly, you’ll end up getting your team stressed out due to workplace stress.
Multi-tasking has a way of reducing the productivity of workers. This is because they might get distracted when they do so many stuffs at a time.
This explains why stores, bookshops and even banks encourage employees to attend to one issue at a time.
For instance, one customer at a time as practiced in banks, or call it first come-first serve.
10. Break times and refreshment fosters workplace productivity:
Break times are important for refreshment and rest.
Their is a popular saying that all works no play makes jack a dull boy.
You could have both short breaks and long breaks depending on the type of jobs you do.
Hence, we can see reason why most factories when man power is needed have a practice of giving minimum 1 hour break to help workers regain strength and refresh themselves for the next phase of work.
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11. A conducive workplace environment increases workplace productivity:
A neat and conducive environment fosters workplace productivity. Hence, never work in a dirty environment.
You can take it further by planting flowers to beautiful your surrounding.
In hot regions, have a workplace that gives a cool environment and a workplace that provides some little intensity of warmness during intense cold weathers.
12. Recite your goals to employees daily:
Don’t just set goal, recite your company and business goals daily to workers.
It helps them keep your vision glued to their minds at all times.
When workers know what to look out for they are motivated to keep working productively.
Nothing is virtually impossible to achieve but ensure your goals don’t sound like a joke else they wouldn’t give it a damn.
13. Reduce social media activities at work to increase workplace productivity:
Social media could be a time consuming platform because of the numerous activities going on every minute.
It could be a wise decision to limit social media usage at work except in publicity companies.
Avoiding social media platforms at work will help workers use more productive time in working instead of chatting and taking pictures at work.
14. Have a to-do list of every day.
A to-do-list schedules your daily, weekly and monthly activities.
Creating a to-do-list will help you know what next to do after another.
For example, you could allocate activities with respect to time.
Except on unexpected occurrences, a to-do-list gives orderliness to your work schedule.
Your to-do-list moves you closer to your to-be-list.
Remember the to-do-list, but don’t forget the to-be-list.
RICHARD BRANSON
15. Encourage workers to meditate for 5 to 10 minutes daily:
There is power in meditation. It releases the internal powers within the mind of a man.
This will help workers think faster and make them more active mentally, thereby increasing workplace productivity.
Hence, kindly allow workers the privilege to meditate for 5 to 10 minutes daily when they have less task at handle.
16. Pressures reduces workplace productivity among workers:
Never mount pressure on workers.
It might lead them to workplace mistakes and errors that would become expensive to correct.
Rather, have a way of motivating them to work instead of putting pressure on them.
For instance, you can announce amazing incentives on the best 5 workers of every month, hope you got my point.
17. Outsource less important jobs and focus on your main goal:
Never get your workplace tied down by jobs you could easily outsource and focus on your main business.
Many small business owners don’t outsource jobs because they want to avoid losing money.
However, outsourcing small jobs could make you keep track on the main goals for greater profits.
Hence, don’t get greedy or selfish, be an entrepreneur that outsources jobs to other businesses.
For instance, a skin care product company might intend to outsource it’s marketing needs to other firms and focus on more productions.
18. Start the day with the most easy and interesting task:
It makes sense to start the day with simpler task.
This is because the simpler task will warm you up as the day goes on, thereby preparing you for the main deals.
Hence, follow your to-do-list in a step by step manner, starting from the simpler ones to the tough ones.
19. Provide health well-being for workers:
Care about the health and well being of workers.
Pay attention to them for increased productivity. Healthy workers are always productive so the well being of workers is important.
Allow sick leaves for health challenged workers and provide medical attention to them
This will boost workers confidence and help you increase workplace productivity.
20. Observe workplace safety measures:
The safety of workers must be in place for workers to fully work without any fear of risking their life’s at work.
In construction companies where workers work at heights far above the ground, a belt is placed around their waist to hold workers incase of any slippery fall from such heights.
For fire prone areas, a fire extinguisher must be in place to quench fire outbreak immediately.
In big companies and factories, a stable ambulance and close medical care center is located to safe guide workers and save life’s incase of unforeseen emergencies
21. Pay workers immediately payment is due:
Payments must be made immediately workers are due to earn.
Its shocking why some companies in most third world countries withhold workers salary and wages longer than the due date.
Hence, never try to delay paying employees no matter the cost, else you lose productivity.
That is to say, delay is dangerous, never delay any aspect of your business.
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22. Encourage cooperation among co-workers:
On of the best ways to enhance the productivity of any workplace is to encourage workers cooperation.
This is achieved by allocating group task to workers, it could be your sales team working with your marketing team.
It could also be your marketing team working with your manufacturing team.
Whichever way it is, workers coming together to get any job done helps to boost their morale thereby fostering unity and progress.
23. Don’t kill your workplace productivity by being a bossy boss:
Being too bossy might turn off employees and not enable them work effectively.
Hence, allow them know the rules as stated earlier but give them the free will to work at ease.
Assist in every aspect you’re needed, be a part of their job and they will go extra length to get the job done.
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24. Partner with investors:
Partnership has a way of making things work faster.
You and your partners can share ideas on how to move your business to the next level.
Partnership fosters good and precise decision making.
In partnership, the weakness of one man business is cancelled.
This is because all partners can easily work together to achieve success at a faster rate thereby increasing productivity.
25. Setup an effective communication system:
There must be an effective medium of communication at a workplace to pass valuable information for the growth and development of the company.
It could be a memo, bulk SMS messages or even through workers group chat forum to enable everyone pick information’s at their fingertips.
26. Periodically organize trainings and seminars:
How trained are your employees? Workers well trained are more productive than unskilled and untrained workers.
Training workers on new strategies and techniques will expose them to better ways of getting the job done.
For instance, the marketing and sales team can be well trained on how to get good sales lead and how to convert the leads to sales.
The customer service team can be trained on the best ways attend to customers to keep securing returning customers because customers are the livewire of every business.
Here is an article educating us on how to build a great customers service in 2 business years, I hope you also check it out.
27. Good maintenance culture helps to increase workplace productivity:
Maintain your workplace environment, for facilities using machines, always ensure that all machineries are checked daily for maintenance such as oil, water and how good the engine is.
Offices must be well organized to allow for free flow of cross ventilation.
As far as possible, all parts of your workplace should be periodically maintained if productivity must be achieved.
28. Automate frequently re-occurring activities:
One way to also increase workplace productivity is to automate activities you do almost every day or every 4 hours e.t.c
This will give you the privilege to engage productively in other aspects of your business.
For instance, you could automate those sales emails sent to clients daily and devote more time in acquiring more leads.
29. Have a frequently asked question session (FAQ):
A frequently asked question session helps to save you the stress of attending to questions you have earlier attended to.
I personally like the FAQ session because it makes it easy for me to understand a brand without having to contact their customers service or support team.
This will save your time and help you devote more time to increase productivity.
30. Find a way to keep workers happy and improve customers service:
Happiness inspires productivity.
Shawn Achor
A business with bad customer service will surely die with time. This is because every business lives on customer patronage.
The productivity of a workplace will be greatly affected by bad customers service and greatly improved by good customers service, the choice is yours.
Hence knowing how to build a great customers service will be of good benefit to you.
31. Set time for lunch, it could be once per week:
This could be fun but why not do it if it’ll positively influence your employees and sense of workplace unity and morale.
It could be a cup of coffee or snacks during the close of work at weekends just to celebrate the success of the week and encourage workers to do more next week.
This strategy is a psychological way of winning over workers and employees thereby motivating them to increase workplace productivity.
32. Encourage workers to make suggestions:
Allowing your workers or employees to contribute their ideas during meetings and trainings gives them a sense of involvement and oneness.
It’ll boost their confidence in working with you and ultimately increase productivity for you.
Allowing workers to have a say goes a long way.
However, you must apply wisdom in picking only decisions that will bring progress and development to your company.
33. Pay attention to customers feedback:
How do you respond to customers feedback? Do you know that customers are the backbone of every business?
Here is a short guide to educate you on how to build a great customer service in 2 years. It’s a must read guide for all business owners.
Work on satisfying your customers so your competitors do not win over you.
Also, work to increase your customer’s and find solutions to their complaint.
The more customer’s patronage you have, the more money you make.
Also, the more money you make, the more productive your workplace becomes overtime.
Ignore competitions and focus on your customers.
Jeff Bezos, Founder of Amazon and Blue Origin. E-Commerce giant.
34. Creating a group chat for staffs helps to increase workplace productivity:
Having a group chat allow workers relate positively anytime anywhere they may be without a physical meeting.
It could also be used as an important forum for urgent announcement and information dissipation.
Group chats help to increase workplace productivity because it allows for uniformity and connectivity of workers on workdays and weekends irrespective of their locations.
35. Attach value to time:
Time is one of the most valuable resource available to man
Attach immerse value to time, let every activity be time tasking, imbibe the time value mentality to workers.
Time is money, loss of time is loss of productivity, here is an article that explain how people lose money when they don’t value time.
This explains why in developed and first world countries, workers are paid per hour to further describe the value connecting a persons time and his productivity.
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How to measure workplace productivity:
Here are few ways to measure workplace productivity.
- Compare your current companies result with the past 6 months to know if the workplace productivity increased or not
- Customers feedback can be a good way to measure workplace productivity.
- Employees are motivated if the workplace supports their effort, hence study and ask your employees as small business owners.
- Check how often complaints come to your business as a measure to know or not.
- Are your existing customers referring others to your business?
- What is the percentage rate of returning customers you have?
- Study your online presence to know if it dropped or improved with time.
Final Thoughts:
The importance of a workplace productivity can never be underestimated, hence this article was written to enlighten our readers on those striking 35 ways small business owners can increase their workplace productivity.
Therefore, I urge you to implement the 35 secrets share here to boost your business and increase profit.
Also, kindly share this article to your loved ones, someone out their needs to see this, you could be a blessing to them.
What number was most interesting to you?, share it with me at the comment session, thanks for your engagement.
