The elusive nature of productivity in business can be difficult aspect to improve when you feel that it isn’t up to the standard that you want it to be. Different businesses and different people will have wildly different approaches to productivity — what helps one person to work well is going to do nothing for someone else. However, when you’re in a position where you’re managing a wide-ranging group of people, you need to be able to focus on conditions that are going to have a generally positive impact.
Additionally, it’s not only the productivity of your staff that you need to worry about; understanding the other areas that you might need to focus on can have you taking a more widely effective approach.
Foresight and Planning
Depending on the industry that you find yourself operating in, the importance of planning and logistics will carry a varying amount of weight. To those in fields like construction or manufacturing, blueprints and project planning will be an incredibly large part of what you do, but even if you don’t find yourself in a position where it’s quite so instrumental, it’s important to think about what you can learn from that.
First of all, it’s important to understand the number of variables at play in business, which is something that can prevent you from getting too upset or frustrated when your plans don’t pan out. However, recognizing that your plans can’t be made to predict everything that’s going to happen, instead acting more as a guideline for you to follow, might help you to adopt a more adaptable mindset.
It could also be, however, that design project planning is an incredibly essential aspect to what you do, and if this is the case, a great deal of productivity might be gained from understanding how you can do this better. If the plans that you make for your projects are as strong as they can possibly be, you might find that you and your team can press forward with a great deal of confidence in the bigger picture.
While adaptability is important, neglecting the process of planning and instead trusting that everything will all come together of its own accord could prove to be detrimental when it comes to coordinating group efforts and targets that you want to meet. This could then also cause frustration amongst your with the lack of structure.
The Topic of Meetings
To some people in business, meetings are an essential part of the day that are instrumental to the business’s success. Not everyone agrees, however, and if you’re finding that you’re holding a lot of meetings that take people out of their schedule, it’s worth examining whether this is an efficient use of time.
Meetings might not be as essential as you believe them to be, and re-evaluating when they’re worthwhile and when they might simply be disrupting the flow of your staff members could help you to be much more efficient with time in the working day.
Cutting down on the number of meetings doesn’t mean that you have no way of communicating the information that you need to get across, however. You can still send emails to all relevant staff, and with the availability of digital meeting software that was popularized throughout the coronavirus pandemic, you can contact staff in a much less intrusive way that could lead to shorter, more concise meetings.
In fact, in the case of flexible working, you might also find it worth evaluating the worth of meetings, especially when you don’t have an office space to talk with your employees in a more general sense. Trusting people to work in their own structure might be more important than you think.
Staff Happiness
This might lead you to thinking about employee productivity and the factors that influence it. You might already recognize how important the conditions that staff are working in are when it comes to their productivity, but you can take this further and take the time to learn how much of an impact their happiness at work as a whole can impact this factor.
Of course, staff happiness in general is something that can be affected by a great many things, but working to create a pleasant working environment where your employees are encouraged to work in a way that allows them to flourish might be the right way forward.
Sometimes this could lead to conflict, such as a desire for flexible working where you don’t think this would work for your business, but communication and an open mind might help you to gain a fresh perspective on what helps people work at their best.
