Can You Identify Productivity Issues?

High degrees of productivity can be difficult to achieve for a lot of organizations, and this is primarily due to everyone’s least favorite part of the workplace: rampant distractions. Your business’ productivity can suffer from even the most unlikely reasons. We’ll help you address them so you can minimize distractions in the workplace.

Environmental Issues
The first productivity issue in your workplace could potentially be the office itself. Even something as simple as the type of lighting (and its quantity) can affect productivity, for better or worse. If your office is dark or dim, it can create sensations of sluggishness in your employees, convincing them that maybe it’s okay to not give it their all and relax a little bit. In particular, the influence of Daylight Savings Time can have a major impact on your workers, as it has been shown to affect workers for up to three weeks.

Adjusting the lighting of your office can remediate this issue considerably. Light is measured in Kelvin temperature (K), and if you adjust your office’s light accordingly, you can create the desired effect in your workers. For example, a warm glow of a fire would be measured at 2,000K, and an overcast winter’s day would be about 7,000K. Of course, neither of these make for a particularly productive day, so you can aim for somewhere in the 5,000K to 5,500K mark--about the level of a lovely sunny day.

Other senses can also play a major role in your employees’ productivity. Take, for example, sound. Everyone is going to perceive their ideal working conditions differently. If an employee needs silence to work as hard as they can, they will be vulnerable to countless distractions that the workplace inevitably creates. Taking these employees into account, it can’t hurt to consider creating a quiet area for your workers to use when they really need to hunker down and get work done with minimal distraction. As for the other workers, you can give them the opportunity to work with their preferred noise level by giving them some noise-canceling headphones.

Burnout
No one can work at 100% productivity for as long as your business would like them to. People aren’t machines--they can’t work as hard as possible for long periods of time without bringing user error and frustration into the mix. To keep this kind of burnout from ruling the roost in your workplace, it’s important to foster engagement for your employees. If you can promote a positive environment, including wellness and personal well-being, you might be surprised by how much you can improve your employees’ motivation and willingness to work harder.

It’s also critical to keep in mind that your employees don’t live so they can work for you. The truth of the matter is that even the best, most loyal employees are working for you so they can live. Therefore, you should avoid encroaching on their personal time as often as possible. If you have no choice but to ask them to come in on their days off, consider compensating them generously for their additional work. You can also make their lives easier when they are in the office by implementing automation solutions for the more menial tasks. This allows your workers to focus instead on tasks that have more substance to them.

Managerial Shortcomings
You should also consider the possibility that your business is losing productivity due to managerial shortcomings from your higher-ups. If you look at your business’ management style with an external perspective, what would you see? Would it be a place that trains employees properly? Do you provide helpful feedback and have realistic work expectations? If you fail any aspect of this, there’s a very real chance that your employees aren’t the ones at fault here--you are.

Thankfully, this is easy enough to fix. All it takes is a bit of solid communication with your employees. Make sure that they are always welcome to discuss any potential issues they might have with your management style. This can also help you make sure that you’re providing enough guidance for particular tasks. It’s important to remember that you might be the leader, but you’re all on the same team--be sure they know this.

Poor Technology Practices
One of the easiest ways to make sure your employees get the least amount of work done is to give them technology solutions that simply don’t work for them. After all, employees are only as effective as the tools they use. If you want your employees to be as productive as possible, you need to make sure they have the equipment needed to do their jobs.

Walsh IT Group can help your business get the most out of its technology, and by extension, your employees. To learn more, reach out to us at (832) 295-1445.