Organising your workplace for better productivity is not nearly as complex or expensive as some people may assume.
Sure, purchasing dual monitors, silent peripherals and other tech-gadgets may prove to be a massive improvement, nonetheless, it’s definitely not the only course of action that you have available. Just by allowing your staff to come to work whenever they feel like it, urging them to keep their workstations neat and cutting your meetings a bit short, you can already make a huge difference in office productivity. With that in mind, let’s discuss some of these trends and ideas in a bit more elaborate manner.
1. Flexible work hours
The first thing you need to understand about productivity is that it’s mostly a subjective feature. For instance, some people can’t focus when someone next to them is breathing a bit louder than they deem normal, while others aren’t distracted by any kind of noise in their surroundings. Moreover, some people work best early in the morning, while others prefer working later in the evening. Although numerous studies suggest that the first two hours in the morning are supposed to be the most productive, the truth is that this isn’t always the case. So, you should allow your team to pick their own work hours.
This is also great for those who are easily distracted, due to the fact that they can pick hours when there’s no one around. Providing this option, on the other hand, can also increase your overhead, especially due to the fact that you’ll have to pay for security guards 24/7. In a scenario where you suspect some of your employees of theft and heavily rely on the peer system as your main mean of prevention, this also might cause a bit of a problem.
2. Neatness boosts productivity
Another trend that boosts productivity is neatness. You see, clutters in the office are never made of randomly generated mass. In fact, piles on most desks consist of vital documents and items, that your employees might look for later on and be unable to find them. Sure, after a brief search, they should be able to uncover the file they need, however, this time spent searching could definitely be better used. In the present-day office, the neatness of your work computer’s desktop is just as important. Fortunately, getting this in order takes even less time and effort.
3. Delegate even the smallest of tasks
Putting one person in charge of the office may seem like the most logical course of action, yet, it has numerous downsides that will, one day, become apparent. First of all, if this person leaves your employment, you’ll have a major problem and have a hard time replacing them. Second, they will always be able to slack in one particular area, then use the rest of their work as an excuse. Worst of all, they could accuse someone else, claiming that they delegated this task to that particular person (in a scenario where they have the authority to do so).
This is why you need to delegate and report on even the smallest of tasks. For instance, one person should be appointed as in charge of providing and replacing printer cartridges. In this way, if the printer runs dry, it’s easy to pinpoint the culprit, as well as determine what seems to be the problem. Of course, it goes without saying that the main purpose behind this isn’t about casting blame but about effortlessly and rapidly finding a way to fix the problem in its infancy. Moreover, by giving your team members some smaller tasks, you can get to see how responsible they are when given a small degree of autonomy. In this way, you can groom some of them for leadership positions without exposing your company to any risk.
4. Avoid unnecessary meetings
Excessive meeting holding is the plight of the modern office, which can be supported by the fact that the average employee spends about 31 hours each month in unnecessary meetings. Now, we’re not suggesting that all meetings are unnecessary or excessive but most of these lengthy group sessions can be replaced by much shorter standing meetings or even circular emails. Needless to say, when there’s something that can affect the future of the company, this is definitely something worth discussing. Same goes for meetings regarding massive projects. If not, simply posting a notice on the board might be an adequate solution to the problem.
In conclusion
The reason why we picked these precise four methods is due to the fact that they can be enforced as soon as today and that they don’t require any kind of financial investment. One thing that should be abundantly clear is that no investment combined with better productivity gives you an optimal ROI, which is something that you simply can’t afford to ignore.
Neil White is a student of a digital marketing, who likes to travel a lot. While you are reading this he is probably somewhere other than where he was yesterday.
