Employees are like the lifeblood for a business firm. But if you are a solopreneur or an HR manager, you will notice two or more employees of your organization sitting idle on their desk and barely doing their chores.
What will you do in this scenario? Will you fire him/her from the workplace or prod him to move forward with positive words? Whatever you do, you will first have to determine the reason behind the unwillingness of that employee to work and then take the necessary measures.
In this post, we will be walking you through the ways to make the unproductive employees to a working machine.
Why Is Workplace Productivity Important?
The short answer is to save your time and money. Besides getting these two benefits, you will also be able to enhance the following three factors with employee productivity in the workplace:
Improving Employee Morale
What it means is that if your employees feel honored and proud of the accomplished tasks, they will be more enthusiastic to carry out the next tasks in as little time as possible.
This is a positive loop that propels your employees forward with a sense of utmost responsibility and accomplishment. A virtuous cycle, indeed!
Remedying Employee Downtime
Unproductive employees will take much more time to complete a task. With a delicate observation of the work process of the unproductive employee, you can identify his or her bottlenecks or wrong techniques and thus can rectify him or her easily.
Strengthening Customer Relationship
For many businesses, profit-making is the one and only objective. The pathetic matter is that they barely think about the long term sound relationship with their customers.
On the flip side, if you can ensure productive employees at your workplace, you are going to meet the deadlines of your projects very easily. This sense of accomplishment will make both the customers and the employees feel happier.
Additionally, your happy employees will talk in a friendlier way with customers which will boost the up-selling, cross-selling and attract new customers.
How to Manage Lazy Employees & Make Them Powerhouses
Here is how to improve productivity in the workplace by dealing with the low productivity employees with various effective tactics:
Setting up Goals for Your Employees
70% of employees say their managers do not provide them clear goals and directions.
Interact
It all starts with setting up goals and objectives for your employees. It allows your employees to stay engaged due to the time frame. Without goals and objectives with a certain time frame, you can not elicit the sense of self-engagement in the mindset of your employees.
Recognition of Work Activities
It’s not that only promoting with increment will enhance the productivity of your employee. Research shows that employee work recognition works way better when it comes to employee productivity. Here is an amazing fact:
Friendliness in Work Environment
If you observe that an employee is not working properly, you should ask the persons around him whether he is passing hard times in his or her personal life.
If so, you should personally approach him/her to help out. Remember the saying, “Employees do not quit a job, they do quit toxic work environment.” So, always try to maintain a friendly environment inside your organization.
Time Tracking Apps
The first thing you want to employ is a time tracking software. It will be pretty helpful to gauge the efficiency of your employees.
The added benefit is that your employees can also measure their work efficiency by themselves.
Collaboration Tools
If you are managing projects with an army of team mates, you will need to micromanage each and every tasks, subtasks which is pretty tough for a single person.
For better team collaboration, you will need to assign users, discuss a problem in a comment thread and communicate through emails.
You can easily avail these services in a body from a project manager.
Communication Gaps
In the 1990s decade, it was not necessary for a business firm to use the internet nor to use the communication software like Email, Skype, Zoom, Whatsapp, Google Meeting or things like that.
But it has become a bare necessity to deploy these communication tools for your business these days. Proper communication makes sure that all of your employees are engaging with the office activities properly.
Improve the Recruitment Process
Productive and talented employees should be hunted from all along. You should make the recruitment process more efficient with a software tool. With a recruitment solution, you can effortlessly pick the best employee from a pool of candidates.
A hiring software can help you take a screening test, get resumes, set the interview room and even can assign the hiring lead.
Here is a 9-step recruitment process documentation from our friends over at TimeDoctor to help you hire the best talent from anywhere in the world.
Train Your Employees
After hiring your employees, you not only need to introduce the working ergonomics to the newly recruited employee but also instruct him/her about the associated duties and responsibilities.
This is really helpful to increase efficiency or productivity by being on the same page quickly. To this end, using a training tool can be pretty effective.
Stop Micromanaging
When you find an employee slacking off too often. You will get to him/her and ask him/her to do it. The employee will get more nervous and will continue to perform poorly.
This destroys the self-esteem of the employee. It’s a vicious cycle that happens even in the biggest multinational corporations.
If such things are occurring in your workplace, you should put a halt to this vicious cycle and should empower your employee by delegating him/her autonomy.
For example, a reimbursement solution can empower your employee by giving him/her the opportunity of spending money any time he/she wants.
Remote Work
All men are not equal when it comes to taste, preference etc. There are a few officers who will always love to work from their home. In fact, their performance gallops and this is a win-win for that employee and you.
Let’s not neglect an employee with his or her poor performance at the office. Give him a chance to work from home if it is feasible with a remote working software
Give Your Employees Freedom
The only areas you should focus on is the productivity and it is not influenced by the employees’ personal activities.
You should measure employee efficiency and productivity just by measuring their completed goals and objectives. The point here is that you cannot intervene when they are using social networking sites. This can destroy the mutual respect between you and the associated employee.
Distribute Perks
Employee Satisfaction is something that Facebook, Google, Tesla and other giants take very seriously into their book. You can arrange a quiz contest on the product or service knowledge and give the winners perks.
You can also motivate all of the employees by sharing a certain amount of profits to your employees.
Other examples could be like Tesla employees save up to 35% on movie tickets.
Measure Employee Efficiency with Productivity Tools
Productivity tools will allow you to get the big picture and measure the productivity metrics easily. For example, if you can use a tool that has an amazing dashboard with an intuitive graphical representation of data then you can easily get to see who is on what.
This way you can also make a report from the data some productivity tools even provides this sort of report on their own which can be quite a time saving for you.
Summing up
Employee productivity is positively correlated with employee engagement. You don’t always have to spend tons of money for the perks that costs your arms and legs.
If you can ensure better employee engagement with a friendly environment and the right set of software solutions, there’s no reason that an employee will remain unproductive.
Finally, we hope that these tips will greatly help you manage unproductive and lazy employees. Finally, if you do have better thoughts on maximizing employee productivity let us know by leaving a comment below.
