15 Productivity Tips to Try Today for Drastic Improvements Tomorrow
Productivity is the bread and butter of company success. Without productive workers, no companies would get anything done, and the building blocks of that company would fall apart. Luckily there are some simple and quick tips for fixing your failing productivity, providing near-immediately improvements and long-term success.
Here are 15 productivity tips you should consider to fix your productivity today. Look out for drastic improvements tomorrow.
1. Implement a Company-Wide Time Tracking Software
Time tracking software is the easiest and most tangible way to measure productivity. This tool is a must-have for all modern businesses. With this software, a company of any size could actively monitor its workers in real time. And this goes far beyond simply tracking time. This level of monitoring also includes screen monitoring, keystroke logging, communications records, security alerts, software tracking, and website history tracking.
Time tracking software and employee monitoring software (often one-in-the-same) are vital for time management. Companies with failing productivity can drastically improve productivity overnight.
Sometimes, the action can be as simple as asking your employees to download this software for you to see a change in their productivity metrics tomorrow. Other routes include establishing the importance of this software, secretly installing it, or holding productivity meetings about how to use it.
2. Collect Productivity Metrics
Often, companies aren’t even aware that they have a productivity problem. Collecting metrics is the best way to understand company overhead and track productivity. Metrics for productivity depend on your software features, which can include:
- Timesheets
- Time spent on apps/websites
- Time spent on projects/tasks
- Breaking down the different types of tasks/projects/clients
- Data visibility and data movement
- Webcam monitoring
- Clocking in and clocking out
- Percentage of work for the company- or team-based activities vs. individual productivity
- And more
You can’t have metrics without tracking software, so implementing this today will make this change for tomorrow.
3. Review Metrics and Time Tracking Data Regularly
Once you’ve established your monitoring software and metrics, you must review this data regularly. Set up meetings with your employees to ensure they understand how the metrics and time tracking data will be used.
Continue to meet with employees regularly to review this data and plan productivity goals and productivity improvements. With this software and metrics, you can make simple steps to fixing poor productivity habits.
4. Consider Productivity as a Performance Review
Performance reviews are vital for both employees and employers to gain an understanding of how the employee has performed during their tenure.
A performance review can be about new projects, their fit in the company culture, and how the employee has excelled at the company (or not).
Use productivity metrics in your performance review so that your employees know productivity will continue to remain a key metric and vital to the success of their job.
5. Audit Your Productivity Today
Just like downloading time tracking software to gain productivity metrics, you can also audit your company productivity to understand where roadblocks, red flags, and areas of optimization are located.
Maybe your productivity is not failing as badly as you think, and other changes need to be made. Audit your worker loads, meeting times, timesheet, and more to see where your workers are failing. Your audit can help dictate which time and employee management methodology would work best in your situation.
6. Hold Meetings With Employees to Discuss Quick and Obvious Productivity Failings
Is productivity still failing? Hold a meeting with your employee and be frank with them. Let them know that the company or individual productivity is in a downturn, and you need their help to figure it out. They could point out some evident productivity failings, like a coworker not doing their job or another coworker being burnt out. It could also be a significant software issue you have been informed of.
You don’t always need to focus on productivity metrics exclusively. Consider habit building, educational training, and self-improvement courses, which allow your employees to focus on improving their well-being, which can translate into better working habits.
7. Assess Your Company’s Software Workflow for Productivity Roadblocks
In the same conversation, you can speak with your employees to talk about common workflows. Sometimes company security and IT requires workers to jump through certain hoops; these could drastically hinder your company’s productivity.
Ask your workers how it’s going, or if there are issues, and see if improvements can be made. If they feel like a certain software is slow, or they use procrastination to avoid that task, then these are red flags.
8. Recognize Work From Home Pain Points
With a large portion of the American workforce going remote, there are a lot of new pain points that have emerged. Working from home is great for some, but sometimes for productivity, it can be rather dismal.
The thing is—the at-home work environment can also negatively impact engagement, which can affect productivity. If you’re considering work from home as a long-term situation, then you’ll want to take steps to address the distraction factor, and poor productivity that work from home can produce.
Maybe your remote workers want the accountability of monitoring software. Or perhaps they need regular meetings in the morning to stay on task. Address your remote workers’ needs in 1:1s and see if there are ways that your company can step in for improvement.
9. Hold Team Bonding to Build Company Culture
Whether you’re remote or in-office, team bonding can support productivity and is an important thing. Sometimes your workers need a little relaxation and time to get to know their office mates outside the corporate setting.
Team building, downtime, and time not focused on work can increase employee happiness and reduce burnout-related errors. You might also find that your employees have more motivation and creativity inspired by the team bonding event.
10. Cut Out Weak Links
Often, when productivity is failing, one or two workers cause it. With your newly implemented productivity metric system and software, you can spot weak links quite easily.
Missed deadlines, poor work, and failing to time tracking. What tasks are important to your company, and which workers fail in multiple ways? Bring together all these elements and start to make some changes.
11. Bring in a Professional Team Builder
Like team bonding, you can also bring in a corporate team builder or MC to help bring your workers together. This can be the person your upper-level management turns to for leadership tips and actionable items dedicated to your company goals.
A professional team builder can come into the office and watch your team work; they are the expert and will be able to highlight high-level and fine-grain productivity pain points.
12. Monitor Time Spent on Social Media
When it comes to failing productivity, there are often a few red flags that you can curtail right away. One of these things is time spent on social media. Use your time tracking software to signify that social media use like Facebook and TikTok is off-limits.
Time spent on these sites on a tracked device will be flagged, and the admin alerted. Have a no-phone policy so that you know your workers aren’t on social media on their phones, too.
13. Monitor Slack and PM Time
Your workers may look like they are working, but instead, they are chatting away online. Check your Slack records with your employee monitoring software or any personal messenger and stop this activity quickly. This simple thing can drastically reduce poor productivity and productivity stress.
14. Set Baseline Goals for Time Tracking and Productivity
Sometimes productivity fails when the team has no goals. Well, this just means that the company needs a baseline set of goals for time tracking and productivity.
What would success look like for your company? Is it more time spent in brainstorming meetings? Is it more output? How about the quality of your product? Defining your KPIs is critical to succeeding at productivity.
15. Secretly Monitor Your Employees for Productivity Pitfalls
And finally, there is remote monitoring. Remote monitoring is simply employee monitoring and time tracking software secretly installed. For example, you can install this software remotely from your admin console, and your employees would be none the wiser.
Additionally, they can be ready to perform time tracking for tasks and know that the time-tracking software is there. Still, they would not be aware of all the software’s capabilities like keystroke logging or Slack monitoring. With this remote monitoring, you can get all the info you need to stop poor productivity in its tracks.
Managers use employee monitoring to catch a wide range of productivity pitfalls. Use this software to track multiple devices across many teams, even in remote settings.
Need to improve productivity today? Reach out to the experts at SoftActivity to learn more.
By SoftActivity Team.