7 Innovative Ideas to Enhance Workforce Effectiveness

Trends and ties change, such as the millennial generation, which doesn’t believe in spending every hour of the day at work. For a business, it could mean that you should come up with solutions that can make those hours count. That means employing strategies that translate to increased efficiency and boost employee performance.

So, what can you do to accomplish that? Below here, we mention seven tips that will help you get started down that road. You can keep improving and tweak these ideas to ensure they suit your business culture and type.

‘Delegate’ is not a wrong word

According to a research study by Zhang et al., 2017, delegation is one skill that your senior management should be proficient in, for promoting employees’ feedback seeking behavior. They might think that they know how to delegate but getting them actually to practice it is a whole other issue. It might seem important to be involved with everything that goes on in the company. However, if they keep wasting valuable time rechecking every detail, things will simply never get done!

Instead of micromanaging the employees, things will run much more smoothly, if qualified employees are entrusted with important responsibilities. After all, you believed they could perform those tasks, which is why you hired them in the first place. Why not give them a chance to prove it? Want to know which employee is fit for a task at hand? Try out these smart tools!

As employees get the impression that they are thought capable enough to work things out on their own, they will become more interested in proving you right than chafing at the chains!

Keep meetings to a minimum and training to optimum

Stop the meeting madness by Harvard Business Review is a research study, revealing that about 65% of the survey respondents admitted that meetings decrease their efficiency. Meetings keep them from doing work, hence they fail to meet deadlines. 71% believed that meetings are inefficient and unproductive. 62% said that meetings are not efficient enough to bring the team closer.

We’d advise you to say no to meetings simply, but unfortunately, they are one of the most effective ways of getting things done at work. Even so, meetings suck up valuable employee time – time they could spend doing something more productive!

According to Atlassian, these unproductive meetings can take up more than 30 hours of the time an average employee spends at work! Meetings also keep the employees from focusing on their work. We have all heard them complain about meetings. If following up and coordination are your goals, then you could look for alternate ways to do that. Try to think of having that conversation over email, phone, or even a web-based conference software like Zoom. They might get things done more efficiently.

Another good idea is to hold standing meetings because the evidence tells us that they boost employee engagement, improve group performance, and decrease territoriality. If that doesn’t work, you can always try out these unusual ways to spur creativity during meetings.

Include training as an essential element of your employees’ growth and development strategies. Did you know that about 76% of the employees are always looking for  better opportunities in terms of career growth and prospects?

Yes, that is true. And if they are not getting what they require in terms of their own learning and growth, they will switch to a better company who has all what it takes to train an employee for overall organizational success as well as development of the workforce.

Imagine, the core products or services that your organization deals with require lots of updation and software improvement and your core operations team is on it. But then you need to train your sales team to get them accustomed to the newness of the products. After all, they need to understand the product to sell them. So?

Besides, this is just one example, employees from across different departments need training for different aspects of their employment. Therefore, switch to employee training software where you can make training modules from the scratch or customize their training templates in the most befitting manner. Understand, training and gaining go hand in hand.

Transparency and feedbacks are important

As per the stats given by PwC, nearly 60% employees (survey respondents) believe that feedback is valuable for productivity. The organizations that value feedback have 14.9% lower turnover rate. Feedback is 30 times more likely to make workforce actively engage at work. 98% employees fail to engage with their managers who do not give them any feedback.

If your employees know what is expected of them to attain the next level in their career, they will know what to work towards. It will also increase their motivation to get things done to get there faster. Therefore, be extremely clear when stating goals to individual employees. Another way to ensure employee engagement – and get them to be more productive – is to share the company vision with them. Let your employees feel that their achievements are important and a part of that vision.

Moreover, after employees accomplish something, good management technique necessitates that they are provided feedback over it and acknowledged. Even for the times when errors or failures have occurred, promptly addressing them will help maintain the level of employee productivity.

Autonomy leads to trust

As mentioned before, delegating tasks can bring a positive change in a work environment. It also opens the way to autonomy, which can increase employee productivity levels. A stressed-out employee will not work as efficiently as the one who knows their manager trusts them with the assigned tasks. If micromanagement gets bad enough, it will only result in the employee making more and more errors. Feeling stressed out? Get an MRI scan, mixed dementia test and know what has been going in your head!

Not being able to do their job to the best of their abilities can demotivate an employee and affect their performance at work. Look at this study. It reports that a measure of autonomy is more motivating and encouraging for an employee than financial incentives! For example, employees who are free to change their schedules are more likely to be more productive and sometimes finish their work by the deadline. Allow the people who work for you to feel ownership and make them feel valued by the company.

Learn to share

The problems that arise at a workplace should be solved together. If your employees watch you saving the day each day, they won’t even try to solve such problems. In fact, your doing so keeps them from feeling empowered. Gradually, it will erode employee engagement. Practice collaborative problem solving and watch them come up with innovative solutions.

High morale makes employees work harder

A happy employee will be more engaged and work harder; they will also work smarter and better! High morale comes from the company’s culture and is not that easy to set up. But once such a culture has been created, it will keep your employees from feeling underappreciated. An employee who feels disenfranchised will merely go through the motions, eventually having a bad burnout. You need to show you care and keep the morale positive.

Motivation on its own is an empty promise

When managers recognize the contributions made by their employees, employee engagement increases by 60%.

Employers motivating their employees is a good thing only, if it results in the latter being recognized for the excellent work they are doing. Once you have created a company culture that boosts morale, you will have to work to keep it going as well. That means, when your motivated employees achieve something, they need to be rewarded for their hard work.

Of course, one of the best and most logical ways of doing that is through monetary bonuses. However, it might not be possible for small businesses to offer bonuses every time – their budget simply won’t allow them to do so. Does that mean you should remain silent and fail to recognize their efforts simply because you can’t give them a raise?

Doing so will only bring the morale down. Therefore, if you can’t appreciate your hard working employees with monetary rewards, do so with words of encouragement. Then assure that things will change once the situation improves and follow through when it does.

Low productivity doesn’t just affect the bottom line; it also has an adverse effect on the sustainability of businesses. If you feel the level of engagement and productivity for your employees can be increased, then get right on it. Remember to keep the lines of communication open, and you will do much better!