7 Great Performance and Productivity Boosters to Try Out on Your Employees

How many times has this happened? You go into work hearing chatter in your office. You approach the door and open it, and when you walk in, everyone suddenly gets quiet. Why?

Either they were talking about you and using adjectives they didn’t want you to hear, or they were having “downtime.” Downtime is essential to keeping employees going and recharging their batteries. But when this happens at the beginning of the day, it’s not a good sign.

Some CEOs report that they experience this “Hawthorne effect” several times during the day. Now, you may say that it’s just normal for people to get quiet and look busy when the boss enters the room. That may be true to some degree, but it also means that they were not working a few seconds before you entered.

So the question is how do we increase the level of performance and productivity of employees who just seem to be going through the motions?

Here are seven ways to help you to improve your level of performance and productivity in the workplace:

Communication is the key to success for business managers. If you have people who are not meeting your expectations for productivity on the job, you need to focus on your communication with them. Some employees hit the ground running and are overachievers. Others tend to want to just go through the motions and hope that no one notices them; this is dangerous and you either have to retrain and refocus these people on their priorities, or you have to cut them loose.

Bad employees are poison to your business. But take the time to figure out what they are about and what their problems are first. You may turn a disinterested employee into a top employee just by improving your communication with them.

Remember that your brain takes energy to perform at the highest level. If you provide regular breaks and healthy snacks for your employees, you may see a boost in productivity. There are foods that boost brain power, such as nuts and fruit snacks. Exercise also increases energy levels and helps to reduce stress.

Here is a list of healthy snacks that boost energy levels that you may want to keep handy. I’ve also highlighted a few favorites below:

Take care of your employees, and they may reward you with higher productivity and better performance.

Before you can improve the level of productivity in any environment, you must first clear the way of any productivity killers and distractions. Not everyone gets distracted by the same things, but these are a few of the most common distractors:

The 7 Minute Life is an effective means of organizing your “to-do” list into twenty-minute chunks of micro tasks that can be accomplished in short periods so that they aren’t carried over to the next day. Business coach Allyson Lewis, the show’s host, states that the “to-do” list often serves as an actual distractor when you overload it with too many things. She suggests taking seven minutes in the morning and seven minutes in the evening to plan your day. You can do this yourself and also share it with your staff to increase their productivity.

It’s important to empower your employees to feel like they are a part of their planning. By including them in the planning process, they will be more motivated to invest in the goals and to carry through.

Gamification is a term that has come alive in recent years to illustrate the importance of making work fun. Google uses this to the extreme by offering its employees free food, free exercise gyms, and plenty of time to play. The company seems to embody the idea of “work hard, play hard,” and it focuses on allowing staff to enjoy their work while also being allowed to have some downtime.

When you allow employees to have downtime that is written into their day, they are less likely to create their own downtime. Making the work environment fun can include things like having incentives, points, or bonus pay for your staff based on their level of performance. This is called a “pay-per-performance” model, and it is highly effective to increase performance and productivity in the workplace.

When you train your employees on the specific skills and tasks that you expect them to do, you are more likely to get the results you want.  You can’t expect employees to be productive if you are unclear on what you expect, so give them the training ahead of time for upcoming projects. Follow up with a question-and-answer session, or at least let them know that that you are available to answer their questions when they need you.

If you set standards that are specific to the tasks that you expect your workers to achieve, you should start to see an increase in productivity and work performance. If you do not, you may have to pull the slackers into your office and discuss the problem with them—this can serve a positive purpose if handled correctly.

During an interview with a slacker, you will need to isolate what the specific problems are and find out why the employee is slacking off. Are they bored with their job? Are they confused about what they are supposed to do? Both of these reasons are possible, especially with new workers. By conferencing with employees directly, you can increase their productivity level and find out what motivates them.

Measuring and tracking are important to everything you do as an entrepreneur, and productivity is no exception. Try to find tools that will help you measure levels of productivity and performance . These tools are a modern way of tracking time of a task, and are done with a mobile or desktop app. Have your employees download the app to gamify the tracking process a bit. In this way, they won’t feel like you are watching them as closely. Instead, they will feel like they are part of the data collection, and it will provide them with good feedback on how productive they are.

No matter what tasks your employees are working on, or how your workplace is set up, try to implement each of these performance and productivity tips into your organization. The more employees enjoy working in their situation and workplace, the more likely they are to produce better work.

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