Tag: Productivity tracking

Top 7 Strategies to Increase Employee Productivity in 2020

Every employer wants to increase employee productivity and that’s not really surprising. Its like money and no one in their right mind would refuse money, right? 

We’re right in the middle of two eras, the pre, and post-digital age. Technology is at its peak and we’re experiencing products and services that used to be in the realm of fiction decades ago. But let’s hold our horses here for a second and remember the old phrase, “Where there is light, there is darkness”. 

Technology certainly has its own share of downsides, the main one being a constant cause for distraction. Today, the internet is easily available even on remote islands. We all have it inside our pockets now. Thanks to mobile phones, we can easily surf the internet whenever and wherever we want. This also means that we’re always in danger of wasting our time and losing productivity for the day. 

In this article, we’re going to talk about some top strategies that employers can implement to increase employee productivity in 2020. So without any further ado, let’s jump in: 

Ways to Increase Employee Productivity

 

  • Instruct employees to create a to-do-list

Employers need to prioritize efficiency. They should let employees make a list of daily, weekly, and monthly tasks. By creating a list, they will have a structure and plan to stick to. This will also give them a reason to chase and decrease their chances of getting sidetracked by irrelevant tasks.

In this day and age, it’s easier than ever to create a to-do-list. Just choose one of the numerous apps in the market, see if their functionalities suit your needs, and voila! You’re good to go. 

Jean de La Fontaine, the famous 17th-century poet, said:

“One of the secrets to getting more done is to make a to-do list every day, keep it visible, and use it as a guide to action as you go through the day.”

 

  • Delegate tasks

It’s a risk but business owners and entrepreneurs have to trust their talented employees. They need to give them more responsibilities. This will boost morale and give employees a sense of achievement and direction. Plus, it will free up employers’ time and allow them to focus on some other important tasks. 

George Foreman, the two-time world heavyweight champion, said:

“Nobody can do everything well, so learn how to delegate responsibility to other winners and then hold them accountable for their decisions.

 

  • Get rid of distractions

Distractions like mobile phones are proving to be a big problem for employers. Employees are constantly using their phones at work, resulting in decreased productivity. Restricting the use of mobile phones during work hours will for sure increase an employee’s focus and productivity in the long run. 

Use time tracking apps like Stafftimer to monitor employee work activities and track their daily progression. It will likely encourage them to avoid distractions and focus solely on their tasks at hand. 

Robin Raskin, the American author, said:

“The biggest problem is that technology often ends up being a distraction. In an information society, the smartest person will be the one who can shut out all the distractions.

 

  • Have the right equipment and set up

Employers need to avoid being stingy. If they don’t invest in good equipment and tools then the company’s reputation and employee work ethic will suffer. For example, if there is no connection to the internet in a software house, most employees will not be able to do their jobs properly. All the tasks will be on hold and there will be no productivity for the day. 

Gene Kranz, the American fighter pilot, says:

“There is no such thing as good enough. You, your team, and your equipment must be the best. That is how you will win victories.”

 

  • Offer support

Our motivation reserves are constantly depleting. The same is the case for employees. Every employee needs to be motivated from time-to-time. Employers should work with managers and supervisors to get an idea about company morale. Then they should decide if any incentives need to be given. If needed, they should also review targets and come up with realistic goals.

Pete Carroll, head coach of the Seattle Seahawks, says:

“Each person holds so much power within themselves that needs to be let out. Sometimes they just need a little nudge, a little direction, a little support, a little coaching, and the greatest things can happen.”

 

  • Teach them how to fish

No, we don’t mean literally. You know what they say, ‘Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.’ Employees should be trained to enhance their skills. This will, in turn, lead to increased efficiency and ultimately take their productivity to the next level. 

Mark Twain, the famous American writer, said:

“Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but cabbage without a college education.”

 

  • Create a transparent and feedback-driven culture

Many employers and managers never admit their mistakes but in order to create a culture of transparency and feedback, it’s important to admit when you’re wrong. This way everyone will feel free enough to do their best work. 

So if you’re the CEO then learn to admit your mistakes. Employers don’t always have to be right and in control. It takes more courage to say that you don’t know the answer or have made a mistake. 

Whitmore, author of Memory Manipulation: How to Train Your Brain to Think Faster, says:

“Admitting to a mistake means refusing to use other people as scapegoats to avoid responsibility but rather courageously owning up to every single one of them.”

Easy Productivity Techniques to Focus on the Right Work

Our attention spans have taken a hit. If we can’t focus properly then we won’t be able to finish important tasks on time. This all eventually leads to a decrease in productivity. 

In this article, we’re going to discuss some easy techniques that will keep you away from distractions and help focus on the right work. 

Focus on the top 20% of your tasks

The Pareto Principle or 80/20-rule says that you should focus on the top 20% of your tasks. Why? Because in any situation, 20% of the inputs are responsible for 80% of the outcomes. To make good use of your to-do-list, give importance to those 20% tasks that greatly influence your top goals. 

Schedule everything in your calendar

Just making a to-do-list is not enough. You need to mark the events on your calendar as well. This will serve as a constant reminder and let you estimate how much time it takes you to finish certain tasks. 

Try to do your most important task in the morning

Top priority tasks will fill you with the most trepidation. Begin working on these activities first thing in the morning. Once you start and find a flow, these tasks will stop becoming a hindrance and your overall productivity will increase. 

Take care of your body  

You get only one body in this lifetime so take special care of it. If your body is always tired, pain-ridden, and sleep-deprived, your productivity will take a major hit. Why? Because it will impair memory, raise stress levels, and decrease your ability to focus. 

Take care of your mind

Our brain is like a CPU. The better it performs, the faster we can get things done in a more productive way. A calm and focused mind will serve as a great foundation to increase your overall productivity. 

Use time tracking apps

As the name suggests, a time tracking app helps users effectively track their time.  

Effective time management apps, like Stafftimer, can help people make deadlines, avoid getting stressed, improve their productivity & efficiency, and above all else, make extra time for themselves. They will also be able to maintain a work-life balance by keeping track of their time.

Use the Pomodoro Technique

Recent research shows that taking a 5-minute break after every 25 to 30 minutes increases productivity. It allows you to recharge and refresh your mind. 

Our attention span is decreasing and many find it hard to focus for a long time. Look into the Pomodoro Technique and see if it helps. 

Batch similar tasks together

Take care of similar tasks in one go. For example, taking an hour each day to dust the furniture, appliances, cars, etc. This way, you can finish your work faster. Plus, by taking time out to get these batches done, you ensure that they don’t get left hanging. 

Keep a time log for some time

If you know that you’re not being productive but are not sure where all that time is going to, try keeping a log for a few days. 

Write down everything you do during these few days. You’ll soon find where your time is being spent and can start managing it more effectively. 

Unsubscribe from all YouTube channels

Like social media, YouTube channels can waste a lot of your time as well. Unsubscribe from all the channels. You’ll soon find that most of them were not worth your time. 

There are channels that you’ll intentionally visit to watch their latest video. These are the ones that actually hold your interest and you don’t need to subscribe to them. 

6 efficient ways to conduct remote team meetings with least wasted time

A meeting is an event where minutes are taken and hours wasted.

-James T. Kirk, Captain of the USS Enterprise

Remote team meetings took up a lot of time. They were a necessary nuisance for us.

Be it an oxymoron, the truth of these words resonated with us.
So we decided to do something about it!

Reforming Remote Team Meetings

We came up with a rhythm in which remote team meetings were to be held.
After a lot of testing and re-testing, we gathered ways that helped boost productivity, while allowing the teams to stay on the same page as each other.

I compiled them in an infographic to make them easy to understand.

Conclusion

To sum up, it is safe to say that meetings CAN be a huge waste of time, IF conducted without planning.

They can help your business grow, innovate and flourish, OR result in a major downfall. It is all up to you.

In short, meetings are meant to help your team communicate, stay in line with each other and get to know each other better within a co-working space. This doesn’t mean they have to waste hours of your precious time.

Let me summarise the six ways you can conduct productive and purposeful meetings to stay on the same page with your distributed teams.

  1. Schedule all meetings | Plan your activities accordingly.
  2. Fix a meeting day | Avoid impromptu ‘get togethers’ and work disruptions. 
  3. Daily Briefings or Meet-ups | 5 minutes daily is better than 2 hours weekly.
  4. Set a ‘fun-meeting’ day | Optional & recreational- helps teams interact.
  5. Set up meeting agendas | Know what to talk about. Don’t jump in blindly. 
  6. Track Time for Meetings | Most important! Time is money! 

You can go ahead and apply these ways to your business to see the productivity boost for yourself.

To learn more, check out this excellent guide to conducting remote team meetings.

10 Habits to Adopt to Master Productivity

The focus in today’s world has shifted from counting the number of tasks completed, to the productivity levels, in a day. If the productivity is high, the number of tasks achieved is automatically high and the work quality is as per industry standards or higher as well. If the productivity is low, the rate of procrastination is high and the work produced is less in number and lower in quality, i.e. barely meeting the standards.

One cannot be productive 100% of the time during the work hours. However, there are some habits that if adopted by people, can help them become more active and productive in a day.

Many people are of the view that productivity is not something that can be controlled. Whereas, we believe that one can be highly productive or not productive at all based on their work demeanors and habits. Here are a few ways to master productivity in the workplace.

10. Discipline yourself to increase productivity.

There lies an incredible power in the discipline.

The human body is an intelligent machine that learns quickly and expects (and even works on) a routine. Our body functions in a circadian rhythm, the 24-hour cycle. If that’s disturbed, our body starts to retaliate as its something that goes against nature.

When you discipline yourself and schedule your daily activities, you can train your mind and body to be highly productive during work. Here’s what you can do:

  1. Wake up on a set time
  2. Regularly exercise
  3. Have a healthy breakfast
  4. Go to work 
  5. Check off all work tasks in order
  6. Leave work on time
  7. Go to bed on a fixed time

All this will help you be more active during work hours, helping you put your best foot forward.

9. Make a plan before you have to implement it.

Plan for the day ahead, a day before.

Schedule the work to be done on Monday on Friday of the previous week, so you don’t have to spend time figuring out where to start on a Monday.

This would save you a lot of time. You can just dive in and start completing the work that’s already in the queue. This will save you invisible minutes – namely, the time that just ‘flies by’ and you don’t even know where it went and what you achieved in it.

Make the schedule for Tuesday on Monday, and Wednesday on Tuesday, and so on. This way you will have tasks planned have deadlines for yourself and you will get things done much faster and right on schedule.

8. “Think you can do it, and you’re halfway there!”

Mindset is everything!

When you’re assigned a task by your team lead, and it is a big, important task, don’t freak out. If you panic and think that the task is well above your position and will take up a lot of time, or is difficult and beyond your skillset. Then there is no way that you’ll be able to complete it.

If you approach every task with a ‘can-do’ attitude, learn new things in the process, expand and improve your skillset and deliver the task, then you’ll be successful. Taking every task as a challenge you can beat is something that will result in your success within the company as well as wherever you go beyond that.

7. Prioritize tasks according to importance and relevance also increases productivity

Prioritize tasks to stay productive!

It is highly important to know which tasks are important and which can be delayed for a while and it will not matter much.

For example, if there is are two tasks: first, to post a social media update and second, deliver the monthly performance report to your supervisor. It is obvious which task holds more importance, definitely the latter. It varies from situation to situation, but being able to judge that for every situation is a skill that will allow you to be more productive.

Similarly, one must be able to judge the likelihood of completion of tasks throughout the day. If a task requires you to liaise with other departments to complete it, and they are busy, then it is better to complete the tasks that you can complete independently, in the meanwhile.

This will save the ‘waiting’ time and helps you achieve more in the same time.

6. Divide one task into small chunks to achieve it

A mountain cannot be crossed with one step or a huge jump.
It is impossible. However, if that mountain is crossed by traveling small distances at a time and with rests in between, it is completely doable.

The same is the case with being assigned large projects. You are not expected to deliver results in a day. The way to excel at those projects is by dividing the tasks into smaller chunks and working on those chunks, one at a time.

Soon, you will see that the project is reaching its milestones. The small chunks are coming together to form a complete solution for the project.

When you cut down the work pressure into chunks and deal with one thing at a time, you can get more work done. Then if you have this huge ball of pressure on you for completing one huge task.

In the latter case, most of your time will be spent worrying about the things that are yet to be done and you’ll end up achieving little to nothing.

5. Multitask to get things done on schedule increase productivity

Work on multiple things at a time.

It is a common myth that women are better at multitasking than men. However, there is no evidence to prove that. This means, men and women, both can multitask and achieve higher levels of productivity.

How to work on multiple tasks at a time? It is fairly simple. For example, you are asked to maintain an excel sheet for records and work on say, marketing tasks simultaneously. So you can go ahead with marketing tasks and switch tabs to enter records, and then switch back. Allocate 15 minutes to each task, alternating regularly.

This will improve your skills of thinking on-spot and switching between multiple tasks at a time.

4. Keep the goals in sight and work accordingly.

Can you throw a dart without the target in sight? NO! 

Always make sure that you know what you are working for and what you have to achieve through a certain task. Once you have a goal in sight, you will plan accordingly, set your schedule accordingly, and work harder and in the right direction to achieve that.

Once you know how the end-product should look, you will work on tasks to get that end-product. Instead of working blindly and without any idea of what and why you’re doing.

3. Technology is your friend, use it to excel.

Work smart, not hard.

Technology, in this day and age, is your friend and you can use it to make tasks and projects easier for yourself. You can use time tracking software like StaffTimerApp. Simply log your tasks, keep a track of where your time goes with written logs, image, and video proofs.

This will help you save invisible minutes, know what took up most of your time and know where the most unproductive time was spent. Using these insights, you can manage your time better. Remove wasted minutes from your workday and ensure that maximum productivity is achieved.

Automate the tasks that take up a lot of time in manual entries and extra, unnecessary work and redistribute your resources so as to fully utilize them.

2. Have the cushion time period in your schedule.

“Always keep room for dessert!”

Many a times, it happens so that priority tasks come up and urgent work is required on those. These aren’t the tasks that you can place on the back burner while you work on your routine tasks.

To ensure that your schedule can accommodate such tasks and still be on schedule, completing your routine tasks, you always need to keep a cushion time period on your schedule.

These are few minutes of ‘free time’ in each hour so even if you are working on side tasks, your own schedule isn’t disturbed.

1. Allow your brain to rest periodically.

Work using the Pomodoro technique.

Work uninterrupted for 50 minutes, take a 10-minute break. If you work like that, you will have higher productivity, with an active mind throughout the day.
That essential period of rest after 50 minutes will allow you to reassess your task plate. Reorganize to include any change required in the schedule. It will be like a reset period for your brain before getting to work again.

Remember, your brain is like any other machine as well. If it gets overworked and overheated, you will face burnout. Hence, reduced productivity due to exhaustion.

Proven ways to track employee’s productivity in today’s world

Employee Productivity is the buzz word of current times. Many people are trying to be more productive in their personal lives. Many more are trying to enhance their work productivity.

In some peculiar settings like a remote work environment, it becomes more important to track employee productivity.

Defining Employee Productivity

Employee productivity is the measure of the efficiency of an employee or a group of employees. It is often assessed by the quality and quantity of work produced.

Employee Productivity is a relative statistic. For an individual employee, it is assessed by comparing the individual’s productivity to that of a group of people. Employees with high productivity levels are often more productive than the average team. Similarly, people with low productivity levels are often not able to produce the average quality or quantity of work as compared to the rest of the workforce.

Why is productivity important?

Productivity is one of the more important agendas of the management, in the Corporate World of today. The reasons are manifold.

Cutthroat competition is inevitable in today’s corporate sector and having a slow and lazy team is simply not an option.

Much of the profitability of the organizations depend upon the workforce. So it is quite important to have a dependable and diligent team of employees.

The trends, expectations, and demands of the market are constantly changing. To keep up with the evolution and changing the landscape of the market, it is important that the employees are intellectually productive.

Tracking Employee’s Productivity

Having established the importance of employee productivity, let’s discuss some of the ways by which it is measured.

1. Track their time

Often it is a duty of the Project Managers to assign individuals with a list of tasks. Tracking productivity by means of tracking the time it takes to get a job done is one of the most common ways of measuring the productivity of an employee.

For this purpose, many organizations deploy Time Tracking Software. These tools let the employees measure the amount of time they spend on each individual task. They also help employers get a transparent idea about employee productivity.

2. Assess the value

There are many situations where just the measure of time is not a good indicator of productivity. For example, the productivity of a painter is measured by the time it takes to finish a piece. So, either the productivity will come out to be dismal or the efforts to enhance the productivity will result in poor quality work. Therefore, time is not always the best indicator of the productivity of an employee.

One of the widely used metrics of employee productivity is assessing the value that an employee brings to the table. The presence of a certain individual can bring value to your team in many ways. For example, an HR manager might be a source of motivation and positivity for the rest of the team.

An executive might be a good mentor for training newbies. A marketing executive with a stellar personality might boost your sales. An individual with great skills can affect your team in more than one ways and assessing the value they bring to the organization is a useful way to measure their productivity.

3. Cost-profit analysis

Making profits in the universal aim of all the businesses around the world. An employee is productive and profitable if he helps the organization generate more profits then the cost of retaining him in the company.

The cost of keeping an employee on the payroll consists of compensation, benefits and other expenses of the housing. If the revenue that he assists in generating are greater than the costs, then the employee is definitely productive and a valuable asset for the company.

4. Measuring Employee’s Productivity

Having established the importance of employee productivity, let’s discuss some of the ways by which it is measured.

 

5. Indications about the strengths and weaknesses

When you track employee productivity, you get useful insights about the strengths and weaknesses of the workforce.

The managers get to know about the employees that outshine the rest of the team. They get an idea about the team members who are unable to deliver the desired results. The management gets to identify productivity blockades and hurdles.

The data also becomes useful to identify low performing individuals. By correct identification of the problems, the management can take steps towards improving the situation.

6. Guides you about the budget

Managers who know the production capacity of their teams are in a good position to make good financial choices.

Productivity tracking is so much more than just the number of hours worked. It delivers insights into all kinds of available resources. These insights empower the management to make sound decisions related to budgets and financing.

7. A basis for performance appraisal

Everyone needs appreciation for the work they do similarly, employees do too.

Productivity tracking provides ample data for the managers to officially recognize the work and efforts of the team. Therefore, time and productivity tracking, as boring as it may sound, helps employees in making their efforts known to the management.

Praise and rewards can help increase the motivation level of the team. And this, in turn, can help in boosting the productivity of the whole team.

8. Makes employees more productive

It is a scientifically proven fact that individuals tend to be more productive when they know that they are being watched. Just like that, employees tend to be more productive when they realize their team leads are monitoring their progress. 

Moreover, when one employee gets praised for the work that he does. He sets a positive example for the rest of the team which in return establishes a positive work culture. 

Conclusion

Track employee productivity to find out hidden truths about your team. This will not only improve the organizational culture in many ways but also the profitability of your organization!

Like what you read? We have more for you:Top three-time tracking applications for remote employees