8 Approaches To Achieve High Business Productivity
A success of working from home requires a major mindset shift for employees. As it is a completely different mode of working compared to usual ways, therefore employees felt unfamiliarity and ultimate uncertainty that inhibits productivity.
Period of organization change, especially if poorly managed, cause higher stress for employees, sustained productivity plunges and reduced work quality. Thus, the manager needs to keep employees focused, empowered and successful in the coming weeks and months of business description due to the Coronavirus (COVID-19). Failure to do so would result in performance suffering and the company taking a disastrous nosedive.
Keeping and maintaining focus will benefit to employee too. Thriving and achieving while working from home assists employees remain a valuable sense of normalcy.
Here there are eight approaches for you can do today to improve employees’ productivity and deliver value that drives your business goals.
Source from SnapComms
1. Reminders of business’goal & objectives
Businesses have a range of short term and long term plans and objectives that drive the business to success before the COVID-19 pandemic. As pandemic stuck involved globally, some of the businesses’ plans and strategies remained unchangeable will cause the businesses to fail. It is difficult to stay focused on plans originally as the business model unlike the usual face-to-face method instead to move toward digitalization. Besides, Harvard Business Review stated that a business without maintaining a clear and compelling strategy, then their business will fail.
Employees need reminders of your key business values (the elements of your DNA which define benefits to staff and customers) and strategic objectives. Yet remote employees cannot be reminded of these through regular channels such as digital signage screens in lunchrooms or communal areas. Think of their screens as digital billboards through which you can reinforce your values and objectives via custom lock screen messages. Repetition is where tools like this excel, when staff are exposed to messages multiple times throughout each day.
2. Weekly all-staff communication
Disconnection with colleagues and the wider business is a common reaction to working remotely, particularly if enforced suddenly. The traditional modes of communication employees rely on, both formal and informal are removed. Thus, introduce a concise overview of the company position and outlook, plus summaries of key projects and outputs for each department. Hold these events live or distribute a pre-recorded version through a video alert to all staff.
Start weekly and either increase or decrease the regularity depending on need. This helps employees see the bigger picture and how they’re contributing to this, and expands their perspective beyond just their immediate team.
3. Connecting and engaging
A diverse remote workforce is harder to remain connected and engaged with. This is especially true if your business operates a BYOD model, where employees could be working from a range of different devices. Reaching every employee with essential messaging at the exact time needed is complicated.
A mobile-only approach is highly likely to fail. By communicating with staff solely via their mobile phone you’ll neglect 20% to 30% of your workforce, according to research by the Journal of Homeland Security and Emergency Management. Consider the number of employees who have their phones on silent, or are inaccessible or in bad coverage areas.
To achieve the level of speed and reach that’s necessary to connect and engage with your staff, you need a communications platform for these smart devices. By using Mobile Device Management (MDM), a single platform can deliver important messages as well as increases workforce’ productivity no matter what devices, and operating system used by employees differently.
4. Focus effort on the things that matter
All too often being busy isn’t productive. Staff are just busy being busy, completing small tasks related to their roles but which don’t deliver significant business value. Being productive in the workplace can be harder when working from home. Managers need to address this in order to transform their employees into high performing teams.
Management communications must guide staff to prioritize those activities that directly and positively impact the business now. Minimize distraction by removing non-essential tasks to the team ‘parking lot’, freeing up time and effort to attend to important activities and ensuring staff don’t ‘sweat the small stuff’.
Productivity experts recommend the “power of three” – a list of three must-do items which each staff member focuses on for that day, to the exclusion of other non-essential work. This is proven to help employees stay centered and accomplish more, and is a worthwhile technique to introduce.
5. Provide encouragement
Employees need positiveness in times of disruption and change. Feeling a sense of achievement bolsters confidence and mental well-being. It’s especially true in today’s world of dispersed teams and remote workers. Recognizing individual and team achievements and celebrating project milestones are powerful psychological motivators for staff.
However, the informal moments of praise and acknowledgement employees are accustomed to in the office are nearly impossible to replicate online. The answer is to replicate these informal recognitions in the more formal environment of digital channels – outside traditional performance review processes.
An employee app is a useful tool for this. Its dynamic format and social-style interactivity deliver snackable messages that staff can readily consume and engage with. It also provides valuable reassurance to staff during the uncertainty of today.
6. Break projects into smaller deliverables
It’s common for employees to feel overwhelmed by large projects. The absence of the sense of accomplishment which comes at a successful conclusion can also be disheartening.
Try adopting some of the principles of the sprint model widely used by software development teams. Breaking projects down into smaller deliverables makes them feel more manageable, and provides valuable check-in times to monitor progress. It also allows employees to receive regular the sense of accomplishment integral to maintaining focus.
Setting more discrete, time-bound deliverable is important in the absence of the open accessibility of support and face-to-face discussions staff are accustomed to in the office.
7. Maintain managerial oversight
Many employees may realize a challenge to work from home as they are lacking direction or motivation. Left unchecked, this can fester in a persistently low productivity period. Thus, managers should be holding regular progress catch-ups with their whole teams. They can then summarize current tasks, manage day-to-day resourcing, assign priorities and provide support to those who need it. These catch-ups tend to be most effective when held at both the beginning and end of each week.
Integrate your task management and collaboration software for a holistic view of what everyone’s working on and to enable easy discussion. Options abound for these types of software, but Asana or Monday.com (task management) and Teams or Slack (collaboration) are well-known.
8. Strengthen focus on customers
As well as being a crucial revenue stream, customers are a valuable source of information and promotion in these disrupted times. While being sensitive to others’ circumstances, customer-facing staff should be directed to improve their level of connection with customers.
Provide advice, tools or information of value to customers that they can access free. Reach out to them via social channels to understand how they’re coping. This fosters a dialogue which benefits your business in several ways.
It provides important information on the state of the customers’ business, which may affect yours in terms of orders or payments. It strengthens relationships during adverse times, which can evolve into brand advocacy. It also encourages satisfied customers to promote positive messages about your brand online at a time when traditional external messaging won’t cut through.
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