Good productivity is your business’s best weapon. If you want to increase productivity in your workplace, then you should be bringing these ideas to the office!
Kill multitasking
No-one can actually multitask effectively. Not women, not men, not anyone. It’s a myth. Just like the whole left-and-right side of the brain stuff, it’s complete pseudoscience. You might be able to juggle two things or more at once. But are you giving each task the attention they deserve? Of course not.
Employees need to focus on completing each task to the best of their ability – and multitasking drags out this process. Encourage employees to avoid multitasking and give each task their full attention.
Improve project management
Those big, overarching tasks that need to be completed? They’re often tackled in the wrong way. Taking the overall project you need completing and breaking it down into smaller tasks that you can actually keep track of isn’t as simple as some make it out to be.
Using the right project management platform is only the start of keeping on top of things. You also need to ensure that the person running the project is fully capable of doing so. You might want to look for someone who has completed PMP training online, or look into such training for the managers you already have.
Say goodbye to distractions
Employees have a lot that can distract them in the office. Of course, when you tear your attention away from a task, you can lose the work “groove”. This isn’t mumbo-jumbo I’m talking here. You need to be performing a task properly for a good fifteen minutes or so before your brain fully locks into the task – and when your attention snaps away from that task, this process often needs to reset.
Employees need to make the avoidance of distractions a habit. Encourage them to set specific and brief amounts of time in which to do the shorter tasks they need to do, such as checking emails, talking to others, and, erm, browsing social media.
Avoid burnout
Some employees try to increase productivity in the office by eliminating breaks. Those employees are also probably breaking the law, but in addition to this, they’re going about productivity increases in the wrong way. Breaks can actually help you be more productive.
After all, your brain can burnout a lot faster than you think, and that can affect your productivity for the rest of the day. So what actually makes the best work to break balance? It’s been suggested by many that 52 minutes of solid work followed by a 17-minute break is the most effective, but everyone is pretty different in this regard.
Reduce emails and meetings
People often talk about emails and meetings as essentials of office life, and they’re very rarely question by management. Emails are, of course, necessary, and the management of them is something employees need to take care with.
But with meetings, it’s usually in the management’s hands. And guess what? Meetings are horrendous for productivity. So the next time you hear someone complaining about meetings, take the time to listen to the problems!