Why Does Your Organization Lose 10% In Employee Productivity Every Day? To ensure that your employees can give their best at work, you need to closely monitor factors affecting their performance and reduce productivity killers.
By Saurabh Kumar •
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
The success of an organization is directly dependent on the productivity of its employees. The efforts put in by the management and the employees allow an organization to prosper and leverage its productivity. However, not all organizations can optimize their human resources to obtain the desired results and attain the desired objectives.
In 2021, you need to pay special attention to your employee's well-being and provide them much more than the essential amenities to help them increase the overall productivity of your organization.
Your organization may lose up to 10% of its productivity every day if you ignore the support it provides to its employees. An organization needs to consider its employees as valuable assets that provide the company with the desired results and the ROI it is aiming for.
Here are some of the key reasons behind decreased employee productivity within an organization.
Related: 10 Tips to Boost Employee Productivity and Skyrocket Performance
Lack of streamlined support
You can no longer sustain employee productivity by providing your employees with traditional support. If you fail to streamline your support processes, your employees will have to spend a good amount of time searching for solutions to their issues. This often distracts them from their job, resulting in a decline in productivity.
Also, if you provide generic support to your employees that add little value to the solution provided, you tend to lose confidence in your support processes. Due to the lack of an organized support system, your employees would resort to the fundamental ways of obtaining support, such as making calls and writing emails.
This would lead to a fall in employee engagement within your organization as your employees would lose the drive to work for you every day.
Failure to look at the bigger picture
Your employees need to have the bigger picture in mind while doing their job. This makes them understand the importance of their contribution towards attaining your company's major goals and objectives. Further, this would provide your employees with a sense of direction and purpose to do their job every day.
If you fail to communicate the larger picture to your employees, they would have a little context about their work and the implications of the same. This makes the work more mechanical for the employees, leading to a fall in their productivity over time.
Lack of adequate supervision
No matter how skilled and dedicated your employees are, senior management needs to supervise the work done by them regularly. If you fail to do so and your employees need improving, they will continue doing sub-standard work without interruption. This is never healthy for an organization. Some of the common supervision mistakes committed by managers and team leaders include:
- Lack of consistency.
- Lack of transparency about work.
- Micromanaging the work.
- Not giving enough work to the employees.
- Not providing the employees with enough time to complete the work.
- Having a biased approach during supervision.
- Taking the supervision activity lightly
Lack of effective communication
Communication plays a critical role in carrying out almost every business process within your organization. If you have not set up effective communication channels and modules, you will likely see a fall in employee productivity. This is because the intended messages do not reach the intended people on time.
Lack of communication often results in different team leaders giving different instructions to their subordinates, employees not interacting with their peers, unorganized team meetings and much more.
Moreover, effective communication involves the management communicating with the employees regarding all essential matters in the best way possible. Whether the company is facing a crisis, is planning for a new product launch, has revamped its company policies or is making changes in its structure, an organization must communicate the same to its employees as effectively as possible.
Improper delegation of authority
The division of labor is as old as human civilization itself. The management needs to delegate authority and responsibilities to the right people to get the work done effectively. Naturally, a single individual cannot manage every single business process being undertaken within the organization.
If you cannot divide the work among your employees and appoint dedicated managers/team leaders to look after their subordinates, the overall productivity of your organization is bound to come down.
Lack of consistency
If your employees work in different directions with a lack of consistent processes throughout the organization, you will find it challenging to obtain the required results. It is the responsibility of the senior management to make sure that there is consistency in the processes undertaken by every department and by every employee working in the company.
Also, a lack of consistency may occur because of frequent changes in the company policy and rules. This confuses the employees as to which approach to follow, resulting in a chaotic and unproductive environment. It is, therefore, essential to have a clear vision about attaining organizational goals and the direction to work towards.
Lack of mental wellness
No matter how skilled an employee is, they will not give their best if they are mentally unfit. In an attempt to meet targets and attain business goals, organizations often ignore the mental well-being of their employees.
Especially during working remotely, employees often tend to overwork themselves by working beyond the dedicated hours. This makes them sacrifice their leisure and their personal lives. Regardless of the number of hours spent working, if your employees' mental well-being has gone for a toss, it is likely to affect their productivity adversely.
Lack of appreciation
This is one of the simplest yet most overlooked reasons for lags in employee productivity. If your employees are not appreciated for their work, then they do not feel valued enough by the company they work for. Even a simple "well done" after a long day's work has the power to stimulate an employee and encourage them to work harder.
Related: Employee Experience Matters More Than Ever. Here's How to Elevate It.
And now that we've covered that ground, here are some of the most important ways in which you can increase the overall productivity of your employees.
Implementing an integrated service desk
You can resolve the issue of insufficient employee support by implementing an integrated service desk within your organization. These service desks provide wholesome and personalized support to your employees.
A modern service desk allows you to implement a single platform to provide support to employees working in all different departments of your organization. They need to log in to the centralized platform and obtain automated solutions to their problems.
The modern integrated service desks use conversational AI to help your employees interact with chatbots to obtain answers to their questions. Simply by chatting with your employees, these service desks understand the context of the issues faced and provide them with tailored solutions according to their specific needs and preferences.
Moreover, modern service desks provide your employees with an automated ticketing system where the platform creates, tracks, and closes support tickets on behalf of the concerned employee. This allows your employees to get their issues resolved faster and more effectively, leading to increased engagement and productivity.
Effective onboarding of employees
A lot of an employee's productivity depends on how the company onboards them. Always make sure that your new employees are provided with all the necessary resources to help them adjust well to the new work environment.
Especially if you are onboarding remote employees, make sure that you provide them with all relevant resources. such as their log-in credentials, company policies, orientation details and other important information that helps them kickstart their journey with your company on a high note.
Adequate employee training
Providing extensive training to your employees helps them acquire additional knowledge and skills about their job, leading to increased productivity. Organize workshops and have the best experts in the industry train your employees to leverage their capabilities.
If you are willing to train remote employees, you can do so with the help of a modern service desk. These service desks allow you to add all relevant training resources to your knowledge base that your employees can access anytime and from any location. This helps your employees to train themselves and become self-reliant.
Regular monitoring and feedback
If you are willing your employees to provide you with the desired results and work towards a specific direction, it is advisable to monitor their work regularly and provide them with constructive feedback. This helps them understand their shortcomings and work on their strengths.
These were some of the major reasons your employee productivity tends to come down daily and the measures you can adopt to leverage the same over time. I'd like to hear your thoughts about this, and look forward to sharing more of mine next time.
