One of the greatest ironies of the modern workplace is that while everyone is working more, there isn’t a significant increase in output. Everyone’s busy, but there is no demonstrable difference in the collective deliverables. If that sounds like your organization, what you need to focus on is your business productivity.
Boosting business productivity is the need of the hour. Simply presuming that you will increase efficiency by making people work harder is misleading. What you need are efficient work practices that can improve your business productivity. This will be the difference between innovative organizations that grow and others who struggle to catch up.
The benefits of improving business productivity
Business productivity is the measure of how an organization produces goods or services from the resources it needs, such as capital, labor, raw materials, and time. When you improve business productivity, you will increase the total output from these resources.
Why should managers and employees be interested in enhancing business productivity? Because it’s the foundational metric that can affect the overall performance, revenue, and profitability of an organization. Business productivity improves when you focus on optimizing business processes to increase efficiency.
Increasing business productivity offers several benefits to organizations, including the following:
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- It increases profits: By producing more output with fewer resources, there will be a significant improvement in the volume of outputs. This increases revenue and profits.
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- It optimizes processes: Focusing on business productivity will bring to light areas and processes where you waste time and resources. By avoiding that, you can make your organization more agile.
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- It reduces costs: Business improvement techniques will help you eliminate unnecessary tasks. This helps you save your operational costs. It also allows you to allocate resources to more important tasks.
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- It improves quality: Using effective productivity strategies, you can focus more on the ‘big picture’ tasks and allocate more resources to them. This will improve the quality of your output.
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- It makes you more competitive: Increased business productivity empowers businesses to focus on innovative solutions through optimal resource allocation. This is how organizations become more competitive.
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- It improves employee morale: When you increase efficiency in an organization, employees will accomplish more in less time. This improves their morale and leads to a greater work-life balance.
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- It helps attract talent: The best minds want to work with businesses that are more efficient and innovative. Increasing business productivity will improve employee experiences, making it easier to attract top talent.
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How business productivity is different from employee productivity
Managers interested in improving business productivity should understand that it’s different from employee productivity. Although they’re at times used interchangeably, both connote different metrics, and merely focusing on one will be ineffective.
Business productivity measures the efficiency of a business to create outputs based on available resources. Employee productivity is the measure of the output an employee can generate within a given period. The responsibility for increasing productivity is primarily on managers and leaders. Employees are responsible for improving their productivity.
At Heycollab, we have observed how certain businesses roll out efficient work practices with the best of intentions. But they focus on employee productivity and not that of the business. When business units don’t get the desired results, they’re tempted to blame the individuals.
Encouraging employees to work harder to increase collective productivity is a futile exercise. Enhancing business productivity requires a fundamental rethink of systemic processes. It’s only by critically examining well-entrenched practices can businesses identify ways to increase efficiency.
It also calls for a relook at the existing systems. Organizations will have to invest in the right technology to optimize communication, collaboration, and project management. Instead of focusing on isolated aspects, you will have to improve the system as a whole.
5 ways to boost business productivity
These proven tactics can help organizations enhance collaboration, streamline processes, and ultimately increase business productivity.
1. Organize workflows
For optimizing business processes, what organizations need is workflow optimization customized to their specific needs. This helps businesses track employee responsibilities and deliver solutions to increase efficiency.
By streamlining workflows, businesses also make it easy for employees to focus on their tasks, identify if there’s any misalignment between goals and timelines, and seek clarification. Workflow optimization also makes the system more transparent. Managers will be able to assess employee workloads for the immediate and medium term without having to confer with them.
By aligning teams based on project needs and employee skill sets, you can unify operations, especially if you have a distributed workforce. This allows you to focus on the core deliverables of a project. It also prevents overlapping of responsibilities and reduces duplication of work. Businesses can gain additional efficiencies by automating workflows and empowering team members to focus on deep work.
2. Create flexible schedules
Rigid employee schedules are a relic of legacy systems with less complex demands. Modern organizations need to shed this unnecessary attachment to rigid frameworks. Work flexibility is one of the most important factors that can affect employee satisfaction. By giving them the freedom to choose their schedules, you will be making them more productive and involved in their work.
Telecommute, remote, and hybrid work models are worth offering to employees. Even being more flexible with their office hours can make it easy for them. Adding time for vacation or self-care can also reduce stress levels and increase happiness.
Admittedly, flexible schedules can be challenging to roll out. A dedicated project management and communication tool can automate several functions. It also gives employees direct access to their managers. Supervisors, in turn, can track the progress of their employees and give quick feedback on tasks through dedicated channels.
3. Create opportunities for professional development
Growth and development shouldn’t only be viewed as organizational objectives. Employees also want to further their careers by learning new skills and gaining experiences in new domains. Professional development shouldn’t be seen merely through the prism of annual reviews but needs to be a strategic goal for organizations.
There isn’t any one-size-fits-all framework for professional development. The process should begin with an understanding of the specific needs of employees. Some might be searching for mentors, while others could be interested in new skill sets. Organizations should invest in training and development programs that align with employee goals.
Managers can also offer additional responsibilities to team members. It could also be opportunities to attend work-related conferences. All these measures demonstrate an organization’s willingness to invest in its employees. It also proves to the employees that the business trusts them, which will improve their engagement.
4. Support open communication
If you want to boost business productivity, you necessarily have to focus on communication. Analyze the current culture of communication in your organization. Is it too top-down? Do employees have a say in the process? Is employee feedback perfunctory and delegated to human resource managers? How many changes have you instituted based on employee feedback?
Among business improvement techniques, communication is paramount because everything else is a function of it. What’s crucial here is to structure it as a dialogue rather than a mandatory feedback session. The second step is to make it less formal and more regular. Frequent conversations will encourage employees to voice their concerns and inputs.
Open communication should start with managers. By being authentic, vulnerable, and honest, managers can foster more meaningful connections with their employees. This also creates a culture that values transparency. Importantly, with open communication, you will improve business productivity because you will spot weaknesses early on. By solving problems before they become unmanageable, you will improve the quality of your project outcomes.
5. Choose the right technology
Almost all operational aspects are now digital-first in all organizations. Unfortunately, these can be standalone applications or software that make it difficult for seamless and effective communication. To improve business productivity, what you need is a tool that unifies all key aspects that you want to optimize, such as project management, communication, and resource access.
The right software should enable you to form teams, assign and track tasks, analyze workloads, receive status updates in real-time, and foster multiple modes of communication. Such a tool will improve collaboration and make sure that employees don’t waste their time switching between different channels.
Heycollab is a project management and communication tool built to increase business productivity. It increases efficiency by bringing Tasks, Docs, Chat, Calls, and Time tracking in one place.
You can easily manage projects from start to finish through Projects and Tasks. With Chat, you can engage in public, private, one-on-one, or group communication. You can also share files through one-click file sharing.
You not only get Video Calling but also screen recording, screen sharing, and much more. Docs allow you to create and collaborate on documents, while Files will be your new centralized resource database.
Join for free today and see how Heycollab can enhance your business productivity.