Improve Productivity
There are seven areas where you need to work to improve the productivity in your operations:
1. Communication Gaps
Communication gaps are a commonly identified issue in most organizations. It has a direct impact on the productivity of an organization.
A communication gap can be identified as misunderstanding or partial understanding, or a communication made by one person to the other resulting in a full, partial or minimal deviation of an output.
One common issue identified within organizations is that employees often find to do things that are deviating from the manager’s expectations. However, when the root cause of such incidents is analyzed, it is understood that most of the time there was a gap in understanding between the person who assigned the task and the person who executed the task.
Some common reasons for such scenarios could be either the assigned person paying less attention to the task communicated by the supervisor or manager, or the communication made by the manager lacks clarity and is ambiguous in nature.
However, the results of such incidents could lead to major gaps in deliverables potentially, costing much impact both on profitability and deadlines.
Furthermore, one other cause for such incidents is the employee’s reluctance to communicate with the management due to their preconceived assumptions the leader or manager will not be open to discuss any unclear areas or have a fear factor in mind to ask for clarification.
Finally, such communications gaps could cost an organization a lot from a time perspective, like deadline slips and profitability.
Therefore, some recommended approaches to address such situations are as follows:
2. Roadblocks
?Roadblocks are quite prevalent in any organization. Roadblocks can be both internal and external as well. Internal roadblocks are quite easy to address in comparison to external roadblocks.
Roadblocks tend to have a direct impact on overall organization’s productivity levels. Whenever there is a roadblock, it slows down the overall organizational output that directly impacts organizational performance, output and finally on profitability.
As a leader or manager, it is your duty to ensure that none of the teams face any major roadblocks. While some of these situations are quite easily exposed, some of them are less exposed too.
Therefore, you must keep a close eye on the overall business processes to see if any they have any considerable deviations. In such events, you need to figure out the root cause of such incidents carefully.
Root cause analysis needs to be done very carefully because sometimes, the outer appearance of a problem may depict something completely different from the actual root cause.
Internal roadblocks could occur due to differences of opinions among teams or even among business leaders too. On the other hand, it could be due to?employee groups or unions.
For an optimum organizational output, seamless operations of business teams are essential. Therefore, as a Leader or Manager, you need to resolve such conflicts or disputes among teams where it can lead the operations to resume and run smoothly.
On the other hand, there are external roadblocks too. However, as an organization, there is only a limited capacity to resolve the external roadblocks as some of it would be beyond the organizational scope.
While you can do less about such roadblocks, you can always execute a plan B that will help you mitigate the majority of the risks that is pertinent to such roadblocks.
The key takeaway on this section is that, as a Leader or Manager, you need to always keep a close eye on any potential roadblocks that lead to drop your organizational performance and you must ensure that you address them in a timely manner.
It would be best never to postponed addressing such issues, and it must always be the top priority.
It is good to have team-building activities to reduce friction among teams, and it can mostly clear up the internal roadblocks. Furthermore, it is always good to keep good relationships with government and regulatory authorities and be proactive in taking required mitigation measures before a roadblock can hit you hard.
3. Realistic Goals
Goals play a vital part in any organization. Set organizational goals drive all organizations. Goal setting is a key activity of leaders and managers.
While market conditions demand organizations to change fast and adapt to new environments quickly, it is essential to reflect the same in organizational goals.
While goals can be highly demanding, it is essential that the goals need to be realistic too.
Unrealistic goals are not meant to achieve anything other than employee disappointment.
When it comes to any goal setting, the goal setters need to understand the ground level realities and the practical issues people on the ground face.
If the goal setting is done without considering the practical challenges, most of these goals will fall under unrealistic goals. Such goals may appear extremely attractive on paper; however, they are far beyond achievability.
As a leader or manager, you should first identify goals that are unrealistic and then action on driving the organization to set realistic goals.
At a very high level is any goals that require more time, skills, talents that are practically available within the organization or the resources; such goals can be named as unrealistic goals.
Once you have identified such unrealistic goals, the following are some steps that you can follow to make those into realistic and achievable goals.
?Unrealistic goals can eventually make employees stressed and put them in a situation with mental trauma. While achieving goals is quite important, it is also especially important to ensure that employees are given peace of mind and a healthy mind to unleash their fullest potential.
Therefore, setting realistic goals can be beneficial both in achieving those and in maintaining employee happiness levels.
4. Skills Gaps
?Employee skills levels vary from one employee to the other. While each employee has their own skill sets, there can be many situations where you will see a skill gap. This is a quite common situation irrespective of the size of scale of the organizations.
While some employees might be open about their skills gaps, the reality is quite the opposite, where employees try to manage situations without exposing and accepting the fact that they have a skill gap.
Skills gaps can be a major impactor for overall organizational productivity.
A simple and common example would be the effective usage of Microsoft Excel and formulas. While these can be amazingly simple skills, there are still possibilities within an organization where the employees are not aware of how to using ?a simple formula.
Due to such gaps, quite simple work could be done in the most efficient way, involving a lot of time and effort.
领英推荐
Skill gaps mainly drop the efficiency levels, which in turn leads to a drop in overall organization efficiencies and productivity and, finally, profitability .
As a leader or manager, you need to have clear visibility on the skill requirements and gaps within the teams.
Once such gaps are identified, you should put forward a training plan to upskill the resources in the areas with gaps.
However, even though employees are put on an upskilling plan, there can be instances where you may run it to situations where employees are not getting themselves upskilled in the way you expect them to.
While some may upskill in a shorter duration than the anticipated time frame, the other may take a little longer than the rest. Furthermore, there can be some employees who may not upskill themselves at all.
To run this effectively, you should tie upskilling as a KPI where the financial perks and promotions are tied up.
This will make employees give their fullest efforts in achieving these the same. However, if some employees require more time or simply fail in doing so, you need to shuffle such employees to roles that do not require such skills to manage the overall organizational productivity and efficiency levels.
5. Reduce Distractions
?Workplace distractions could be anything that brings the employee attention away from what they do.
It could be something simple like opening a door or people taking louder too.
Modern workplaces are designed in a manner where it will reduce workplace distractions to a greater level.
However, this is an aspect any organization has room for improvements. Such distractions may vary from one job role to the other and based on each job role’s type of work environment.
For example, for some employees working in a Research and Development Lab, loud noise could be something that distracts their focus. On the other hand, for an employee who works on a production floor with pieces of machinery, such noises may not simply distract them from their job.
It is always good to have feedback from employees to identify some possible things that make them distracted from their work.
On the other hand,?you can find it easily by either walking to a workplace or a floor and seeing which actions might get the employees to turn their heads or react.
Some of these changes could be floor layout changes, and the others could be disciplinary changes.
On the other hand, with the current context of remote working, the workplace distractions could be quite different from physical working.
Some of the new normal workplace distractions could be endless email communications where unnecessary people are on CC which will waste many people spending time reading the emails that have them marked in for no reason.
Another such situation could be the group communications and chat groups on platforms such as WhatsApp and within organizational communication and collaboration platforms.
Sometimes, instead of sending a single message, people type in each word and send it individually creating endless notifications that distract so many people.
While these are unthought areas, such things could lead to taking attention from many of people who are part of such platforms, which could lead to wasting a lot of precious time of many employees.
The more the distractions can be avoided, the higher the productivity organizations could achieve. Therefore, we highly recommend leaders and managers to identify and address any distractions within your organizations, so that it will help you achieve the right level of efficiency, leading to overall organization productivity levels.
6. Positive Reinforcement and team Building
One of the finest ways to motivate a team and produce incredible results in the workplace is by using positive reinforcement.
When positive reinforcement is used, you focus less on what people are doing incorrectly and more on what they are doing right.
By rewarding and praising your employees every time they do a great job, you will be able to condition them into doing well all the time.
While using positive reinforcement, you need to favoritism. If one team member seems to be getting constant attention, the others will feel discouraged, and their morale and productivity will suffer. Try to focus on rewarding your team as equally as possible. Also, try not to overdo the positives. While people love to be appreciated, it will lose all meaning if you walk around saying “Great job!” all day long.
?Positive reinforcement is not a replacement for proper disciplinary actions in the workplace. It’s important to focus on your team’s positive accomplishments, but that does not mean ignoring inappropriate behavior. A great balance of positive reinforcement with leadership is what will create a good workplace.
7. Improving Workplace Conditions
Workplace conditions are another factor that can have a direct impact on the productivity of an employee. Better workplace conditions give the employee a good experience, and in turn, they will be able to produce better outcomes.
Workplace conditions could be mean to both physical and psychological conditions too.
Physical conditions could be a comfortable, pleasant and appealing environment that can help an employee feel cozy and relaxed.
Even the design of the workplace and the colors used will impact employee’s outcomes too.
While workplace conditions appear to be good at first glance, there can be situations where the employees are unhappy with certain things that bring their efficiency levels down.
These could be loud noises; distractions etc. that make the employees lose their focus.
Therefore, you must try to understand such potential challenges your employees & ensure you address them on time.
On the other hand, there could be psychological conditions also that may affect employees. Such challenges could be work pressure, team conflicts and many other things, that drop employee productivity.
Some employees may have conditions where it could be a combination of both where due to a psychological condition, they may not like some physical structure or set up.
Some employees have a fear for heights, and if they are made to sit at a table close by to the windows where the heights are visible, it may give them some work pressure that will demotivate them from working.
While such conditions may sound very senseless at the first look, these may lead to high-level inefficiencies at the workplace.
The key takeaway from this section is that, as a leader or manager, you need to make sure that your employees have a sound work environment both physically and psychologically to make sure they these do not act as constrains in doing their day days in an efficient manner.
#leadership #leadershipdevelopment #leadershipcoaching #leadershipskills #leadershipcoach #leadershiptips #operations #operationsmanagement #operationsmanager #operationsexcellence #operationsexecutive #executivecoaching #executiveleadership #executivecoach #productivity #productivitytips #productivityimprovement #productivitycoach #business #businessadvice #businessbuilding #businesscoach #businesscoaching