Getting your team to be more efficient and productive at the workplace can be a difficult task. If you have been struggling for some time to improve the situation, then it doesn’t mean that you’re a bad leader or that they are bad workers. You may just need to change your strategies. Let’s look at some of the ways leaders and managers have found effective with increasing their workers’ productivity.
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Provide More Breaks
A study in Japan several years ago found that workers who got to take a nap in the middle of the work day were far more productive than people who didn’t but continued to work that extra time. Now, that does not mean that you should be suggesting naps in the work place. However, see if you can implement more frequent but shorter breaks. The reason that this can be effective is because the brain can only manage around 40 minutes of concentration before getting fatigued. Encourage your team to get up and stretch, do an unrelated activity for five minutes, or just get a drink from the break room.
Encourage Discussion and Brainstorming
Another way to encourage better performance is to get people’s minds working. Creative thinking can vastly improve problem solving abilities and even mood. If you have a small team, this can be easy to do. Just splash some whiteboard paint across a wall in a designated discussion area. Then use this space to create mind maps, write notes, and perform activities that encourage brainstorming and creative thinking. Visual representations can also vastly help to stimulate the brain. Designate a time each day or week to do this. It can be based on the project you’re handling at the time or some unrelated problem or riddle just to get those mental gears turning. If you have a large team, you can split them up into smaller groups and perform this kind of activity once a week.
Offer Time Management Training
Countless workplaces have the simple issue of poor time management. Essentially, your team members may be ineffective because they don’t know how to be organised with their time. If you have recognised this as a problem, then it may help to bring someone in for a training session or a workshop to teach such skills. Depending on each person’s job, there may even be something specific that they are doing improperly. For instance, maybe one person’s note taking needs to improve. Several of your team members may be wasting time on tasks that can be automated or optimised with the right software. Look into these areas and see if you can find trouble spots. Many third-party consultants and software or apps can fix this with ease.
Other ways that people have improved worker performance and productivity is through daily meditation or yoga practices, exercise, and even reducing the working hours! It may take some time to find the right strategy for your team, but something is bound to work. If you still feel that you are not getting anywhere, the best thing to do is to hire an outside consultant to perform an analysis. This will be a good way to identify what is going wrong.
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