***Contributed Post***
In any startup, there is always going to be the very important issue of ensuring that the necessary work gets done, and that it gets done as easily and smoothly as possible. If this is your first business, you might well find yourself a little at a loss as to how you can ensure that you are going to be able to keep productivity high, and the truth is that many employers and business owners in your position know that feeling all too well. However, it is going to be essential that you try to find a way to master the issue of productivity, and in this article, we are going to try and make this a little simpler for you. As long as you consider the following, you should find that you are able to much more effectively master productivity in your business, and so hope for the brighter future your startup deserves.
Valuing Employees
One of the most essential things that you will want to look into here is making sure that you are actively making a point of valuing your employees. As long as your employees feel valued, they are going to find it much easier, and a much more natural thing, to be able to do the work they need to do when they need to do it. This is because they will understand much more effectively and deeply what it is that they are doing, and why they are doing it. It is therefore hugely powerful to take some time aside to speak to each employee directly, one-on-one, and ensure that they are well versed on why their job is important and what they are doing in the grand scheme of things.
When your employees understand in this way where they stand within the whole framework, you will absolutely find that their productivity goes through the roof. It is a lack of this feeling that mostly produces lack of work, and this is one of the major things that you should focus on if you are keen to try and increase and improve productivity in your workplace. You will also find that actively going out of your way to value your employees more openly will result in a happier, easier workplace and that everyone is going to be considerably more satisfied as a result.
Strong Policies
In a sense, you do need to make sure that you are policing the work that goes on in the office, although you of course don’t want to go too far with this either. However, you can strike a balance and make it clear to your employees that you need them to behave in a certain way, which will in turn mean that productivity is going to always be on the up. The best way to make sure that you are doing this properly is to look into developing some clear and strong policies which your employees need to follow. Having policies will mean that you are clear on what you expect in the workplace, and that level of strictness is often exactly what is needed for a much better way of promoting productivity.
There are plenty of types of policies you might want to adopt, many of them relating directly to ensuring that you are getting the most out of your employees that you can. Having a strong mobile phone policy such as that found at this link will ensure that your employees are not distracted by those devices too much, as will developing a policy around break times. The more that you have these in place, that you make sure you are going to enforce them and train your staff on them, the more likely it is that your employees will be as productive as you would hope, and that is certainly something to think about.
The Power Of Deadlines
Most people find that they work harder and more effectively when they have a deadline in place, and for the majority it also produces much stronger work too. You should consider making full use of this in your business to ensure that your employees are fully aware of when their deadlines are and what they need to do by when in order to achieve them. However, you should not consider deadlines to be the be all and end all. Instead, it is a good idea to focus on them as a means of encouragement, rather than possible punishment. You should make sure that any deadlines you give are entirely fair and that they are not expecting too much, and that you can allow some flexibility. That will mean, for instance, that you need to give longer deadlines for work, which is going to obviously take longer, rather than having a single, top-down deadline which everyone needs to work to. In any case, having deadlines and being fairly strong on them will ensure that your employees get much more work done, and that will benefit your business hugely in a number of ways.
Delegation
A good manager knows that it is important and wise to delegate, so you should make sure that you are doing this as much as you can too if you want the productivity to really be as high as possible. With good delegation, you can be sure that the work is going to get done, but you need to make sure that you know who to delegate what work to, and that you are not merely giving it out willy-nilly. If you can be sure of that, you will find that delegating is much more effective, both easing your own workload and also ensuring that the office as a whole is going to be much more productive. Bear in mind too that people will resent it if you give them too much work to do or that which is too above their pay grade, so you need to exercise caution here. But if you make a point of prioritizing and promoting those who take on this work regularly, then there is a decent incentive here which will only further improve the rate of production in the office. As you can see, delegating your work can indeed be a very powerful thing that you might want to consider doing.
Tools & Equipment
Any job needs specific tools, and the more aware you are of the kinds of tools and equipment your teams and individuals need, the more likely it is that you can help them to do their work as effectively as possible. Finding the right tools and equipment is something which can take a long time, and which you need to think about in order to make sure that you are getting it right, but it is a vital thing which you will want to make sure you are putting a lot of effort into for that very reason. When your employees have all the tools they need, their work will flow much more easily, and you will be able to ensure that your productivity is certainly being looked after well for that reason alone. Make sure you listen to them, as they might know better than you what kind of equipment they need, and you will want to make sure that you give them what they really do need. Do that, and your business will be very thankful on the whole for being provided for in that essential way.
As you can see, there are a lot of things you might want to consider in order to master productivity in your business, and as long as you have thought of these you will find that it is much easier to do just that.