Office Productivity Tips (But if These Don’t Work, We Can Help)

If your employees aren’t being productive at work, maybe the problem isn’t starting with them. Maybe it’s your management style. No offense, but we often find that our customers start looking for an employee monitoring solution before they’ve dealt with longstanding internal management issues that have soured the workplace for far too long.

As Marketing Associate Shawn Hewat notes in a Business 2 Community column, rewarding employees the right way can do wonders for productivity. Boosting productivity isn’t an either-or challenge – you can fix the management issue and introduce a technology solution. Some key ideas he mentions:

Rewards Come in Plenty of Forms. Money talks – and it’s hard to beat a raise in salary or a quarterly bonus. But then, good employees can often achieve these kinds of compensation for other reasons, like just meeting their regular performance review metrics. To go beyond the formalities of your office bureaucracy, Hewat suggests celebrating their birthday or offering more open working conditions like flexible hours – or how about taking the top producer out for lunch, or getting them tickets to a movie or sports event?

Gamify the Rewards Program. We’ve seen this work wonders with plenty of our customers – introducing a competitive element that normally is the preserve of sales reps looking to beat their colleague for that free trip to Bermuda. Employees earn points for achieving something extra in their job description – and at the end, the winner feels a sense of entitlement.

Essentially, these ideas are about getting employees feeling engaged in what they do and reminding them that they’re part of a team. They’re not just some anonymous piece of hardware in the corporate machine. Recognizing good performance is as important, if not more important, than nailing the poor performers.

When new customers come looking for employee computer monitoring software, the troublemakers they’ve already identified are typically the least happy employees on the team. These people don’t seem to take much pleasure in their goofing off – and it’s often the case that the most productive employees are also the happiest, in and out of the workplace. If you’re managing a department or larger company, do your part to keep employees productive – and with our software, we’ll do our part to help you identify the ones who might need a little extra attention.