Have you ever felt like employees are constantly chasing their tails in the office? Many meetings scheduled, emails landing in the inbox and being answered all the time? And yet, at the end of the day, your team has delivered almost nothing. Nothing to show for the hours of “ hard work” everyone put in. Throwing office productivity down the drain.
There's nothing worse than the feeling of an unproductive day at work. And the ease of wasting time in an office environment is countless.
There are some rules that no one says, but that employees usually follow:
- Meetings are important
- Email is king
- They should appear busy , even if they are not
- They must appear stressed , as they appear to be busy
The best thing you can do is throw all the outdated rules out the window and replace them with one rule:
Focus on the result
Don't measure how many minutes or hours your team dedicates, but rather the results that will be delivered that day.
The problem is that many employees don't care about the results, thinking only about feeling busy and working long hours because of it. busy mentality results mentality , the entire company begins to change.
Employees start to spend their time on more important things, after all, this generates more results.
Here are 7 tips to increase employee productivity in the office and tools that can help with each tip.
1. Priority
Each employee should focus on a maximum of 3 priorities per day . This means that if everyone has a big to-do list, they should ignore everything else until tomorrow.
When an employee is distracted and overwhelmed with a long to-do list, it becomes difficult to concentrate and procrastination takes over. Therefore, instruct your employee to focus on 3 most important things.
Tooltip: To help you choose priority tasks, there are some methodologies that can help you choose:
- Is your focus on finance? Test the cost x benefit first;
- Is your focus on time? urgency x importance matrix ;
- Is your focus on results? Try the effort x impact matrix ;
- Is the priority general? Stick with the BASICA and RICE .
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2. First things first
Employees can never start their day with the tasks that are easiest or that they enjoy most. He should always start with the most difficult and most important task. It will probably be this task that will generate the most results at the end of the day.
If the most difficult task comes last, the person responsible may run out of time and it may not be delivered, or it may be done in a hurry and delivered with poor quality.
By tackling the most difficult task first, the employee has plenty of energy and can be confident that it will be accomplished no matter what.
Tool tip: it is very important that your company implements a tool to monitor the organization's or sector's tasks. The ones that stand out the most are Trello , Pipefy and Monday . With one of these tools, all employees can monitor the status of tasks, responsible parties and deadlines.
I suggest you create a column called “Tasks of the day” where each employee can only have 3 tasks to focus on and deliver.
3. Take control of email
For many employees, email sets priorities and takes control in the office.
As a manager, your role is to help them limit the time spent checking and responding to emails. Just because there are emails in the inbox doesn't mean the employee needs to respond to them all immediately. No tragedy will occur if he takes an hour or two to respond to an email.
We recommend checking email only 3 times a day at most. Once in the morning, once right after lunch and once in the late afternoon. In addition to improving the team's focus, the moment an employee opens their inbox, several emails will be responded to and sent at the same time.
Tool tip: To help with this tip, we recommend an alignment conversation with all employees so that times for accessing corporate emails can be agreed. Also, disable any automatic notifications from your browser, computer or cell phone.
If the conversation doesn't work, you can implement a tool that releases the email by time. This way, even if the employee tries to access the email, it will be blocked if it is not at the time established in the tool.
4. Keep all meetings 20 minutes long
What was supposed to be a solution, meetings can be the biggest waste of time . There seems to be an unspoken rule in people's minds that all meetings must last at least an hour. Why? How do all the topics fit neatly into a one-hour slot?
Reduce meetings to a maximum of 20 minutes and preferably standing. Magically, it seems that people think and express themselves better when they are standing and consequently the meeting becomes more effective.
If you want to pass on a message to an employee, go to their desk and speak directly. There's no need to set up a meeting and summon a battalion of people just to feel busy and stop the work of an entire team.
Tool tip: any cell phone or watch that tells the time 😅. If you want, you can set a timer or alarm clock to notify you when the time is up.
5. Always have an agenda for every meeting
Many meetings become long and often without any conclusion because there is no structure to them. Insist that the person responsible always has a complete agenda before any meeting, detailing exactly what will be discussed. This means that the person responsible for the meeting studies all matters in detail, reducing waste during the meeting itself.
Tooltips : Great tools to help organize meetings are Evernote and Google Keep .
6. Control employee internet access
The internet is the main villain against focus and productivity in the office. The waste of time is so much that according to research, office workers are interrupted on average 14 times a day by internet tools. And the worst thing is that after an interruption, the employee can take more than 20 minutes to return to the original task.
Without any type of internet access control or policy, it is normal for employees to spend part of their time accessing their personal email, social media profiles, YouTube videos, WhatsApp messages or researching topics of interest to them.
Therefore, controlling internet access in companies is a fundamental policy in team management, as it reduces wasted time with increased focus, in addition to avoiding various security problems with access to harmful websites or famous internet scams.
Tooltip : Lumiun is a great internet access control solution for your company. With it, you can block websites and categories of websites that are outside the scope of work, allow access according to schedules and monitor in real time what each employee is accessing.
7. Unplug
After spending hours in the office, delivering results, it's time to rest. I know that for a manager, who is busy 25 hours a day, it is difficult to implement all the tips above, especially this last one. However, it is essential that everyone takes time to rest and disconnect from work.
If you manage to implement the previous tips, you can be sure that after work hours you will have a feeling of accomplishment and several results delivered. Furthermore, with a good rest your energy will be renewed to start everything the next day.
Tooltips: your bed, family, football, cinema, shopping, beer, cigarUltimately, your life !
If you want to know more about office productivity, read our article on Employee Internet Productivity in 2020 .
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