7 Easy Tips to Make Your Employees More Efficient

nvestopedia.com defines efficiency as:

"A peak level of performance that uses the least amount of inputs to achieve the highest amount of output. Efficiency requires reducing the number of unnecessary resources used to produce a given output, including personal time and energy. It is a measurable concept that can be determined using the ratio of useful output to total input. It minimizes the waste of resources such as physical materials, energy, and time while accomplishing the desired output."

Okay, so what does that mean?

Basically, work smarter, not harder!

With 2020 and 2021 being the years of remote work and unlimited distractions, whether you're back in the office yet or not, employee efficiency has never become so necessary to manage.

Here are 7 tips to make your employees more efficient:

1. Communicate Well-Defined Expectations

Increasing efficiency requires setting attainable goals for the employees. When everybody has specific, straightforward objectives to aim for, they can prioritize their goals. Start with the development of broader company objectives, and once defined, all employees can work together to achieve these goals.

2. Conduct Regular Performance Assessments

Regular feedback is critical when it comes to optimizing the motivation and efficiency of your employees. Positive and negative performance assessments will help inspire the employees to make any improvements towards how they work. Ideally, once you have provided constructive criticism, you can also ask them what the organization could do to improve. This way, you will also gain information on what your employees need to make their jobs more efficient and to promote a culture of transparency.

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3. Prioritize Training and Development

Although employee training does not need to be excessive, the overall workplace efficiency relies primarily on how well your employees know the fundamentals. Your employees are still capable of learning on the nob without any continual training, but that's working harder, not smarter. Taking extra time to train employees on what they need to be doing and how to do it, instead of letting them try to figure it out on their own, will reduce the time it takes to get the desired results and ultimately increase efficiency.

4. Encourage a Positive Work Environment

If you are committed to enhancing efficiency, building a positive working environment is essential. Employees that are satisfied at work are more productive in their time and will deliver better results. You can compensate employees for their excellent work with extended holidays, incentives, and recognition to raise morale. For example, you can encourage the employees to take a coffee break or a walk to move around from their desks.

5. Motivate Employees with Incentives

Tying in with promoting and creating a positive work environment, incentives, and rewards increase employees' efficiency, making them feel more valued by acknowledging and rewarding well-performing employees. It is one of the main contributors to employee engagement, which is strongly related to efficiency. By offering an incentive, employees are more likely to be inspired to do a better job. Incentives go deeper than just monumental values but could include an increase in salary or some financial bonus. The challenge with typical incentive programs is that it’s difficult to align rewards to results. Using smart performance management software can help you ensure that you reward contributions effectively.

6. Utilize Team Building Activities

The more employees communicate with each other, productivity increases, which increases the efficiency in the workplace. When employees learn to interact better, workplace efficiency improves. Team-building or off-site events are perfect opportunities for employees to learn how to work and communicate together. You could even pair these team building activities with ways of assuring employees of the benefits of being involved and how they support their wellbeing in general, including physical and mental aspects. Fewer employees sick and more productive hours make healthier workplaces. These kinds of experiences benefit employee relationships in a fun way that increases morale.

7. Invest in a Robust Task Management System

Research shows that multitasking decreases efficiency in the workplace. This is why companies and teams seek out task management software. These tools streamline work by creating and scheduling essential tasks, sending reminders to other employees automatically, knowing when someone else is completing a job without having to ask, and much more.

The challenge with traditional task management software is that it requires a lot of user input. Manual data entry is needed to create tasks, which ends up meaning even more work for individual employees. A better approach is to use Artificial Intelligence (AI) to automatically bring all your employees' tasks from all their systems into one dashboard. This helps organize and save time from switching between apps, which costs up to 32 days of lost productivity per employee per year! MetaSpark focuses on automating this process, so your employees can get all of their work done from a single dashboard – no data entry required.

Interested in investing in employee efficiency to make your company more successful?

Investing in employee efficiency ultimately improves the bottom line, by getting more productivity out of each employee. It also improves employee morale and retention. Learn more about how MetaSpark can help make your employees more efficient!