Productivity at work is probably the most studied, and most misunderstood, aspect of business management. The usual setup—longer hours, tighter deadlines, more meetings— seldom yields tangible results, only better-looking processes. Real, lasting productivity is not about working faster.
It is about an atmosphere that protects concentration and a culture that evaluates performance honestly, about a management style that sees a person first, an input second. The best aren’t pushing their people harder. They’re helping them perform better. Ten principles to do just that.
1. Set Clear Goals and Expectations
One might say that ambiguity is the single biggest unrecognized drain on time, energy and performance in the workplace. People who don’t know exactly what they are working toward, who don’t have a clear picture of what success will look like, who haven’t established precise, quantifiable objectives at the personal, team and organizational levels and on a regular basis tend to be busy but not very productive.
Having clearly defined, easily understood individual, team and corporate goals, goals written down and checked regularly, helps provide the guidance needed to make intelligent choices about where to put one’s energy. The transparency of setting objectives is not a burden of management: it is the beginning of all of them.
2. Cut out Unneeded Meetings
Meetings are the most consumed, and the most wasted resource in today’s knowledge workplaces. Schools of thought document that a large percentage of participants are in meetings they shouldn’t be. Topic could be handled in a one half page email brief and can come up empty handed with actionable outcome. Every hour wasted in a useless meeting is a dollar wasted that could have gone to the focused, deep work that creates the output of the organization.
The best teams are often the ones where the leaders have summoned the strength of will to shield their people from needless meetings screaming at the top of their collective lungs that participation should be kept to a manageable level, every meeting should be scrutinized for necessity, pre-assigning to the screen, not the room, every meeting that isn’t essential for real time, direct dialog.
3. Promote Deep Work with Dedicated Time Blocks
The productivity challenge in today’s knowledge workplace is fragmented attention. Long-term distractions, distractions from an open-plan office and a corporate culture that demands immediate availability have created workplaces where extended distraction-free work (the kind where the most important work gets done) is no longer the norm.
With quiet hours policies, no-meeting days, notification filtering software, or flexible schedules that let people work where they work best, organizations get demonstrably better results from the same people.
4. Invest in the Right Tools and Technology
Employees don’t thrive with technology that creates friction, cuts productivity, and necessitates workarounds. Unexpectedly, the productivity costs pile up during every workday: lame software; disconnected disparate systems that need to have data marshaled back and forth; slow/annoying admin tasks that beg to be automated.
Productivity drivers are assessments of the tools the workforce actually uses, genuine engagement by Managers on where technology is injecting friction, eagerness to help fund and actively implement solutions that removes real bottlenecks.
5. Priorities for Employee Wellbeing
The link between employee wellbeing and workplace performance isn’t emotional. It is evidence based. When employees are chronically stressed, sleep-deprived, physically inactive, or dealing with a mental health condition that psychologically impacts them, they are running at a deficit and their work is negatively impacted by this. A healthy rested psychologically safe employee on the job outperforms their feisty anxious counterpart every time.
You Might Be Interested In:
- How Digital Transformation Is Leveling the Playing Field for Small Businesses
- 10 Powerful Customer Relationship Management Strategies
- Effective Strategies for Acquiring New Customers
- How to Choose the Right Business Model
- Discover the Advantages of Being Patient in Business
Companies who choose to support employee wellbeing in the form of flexible work hours and locations, mental health resources and encouragement, physical activity incentives and a supportive culture that honors real limits are not “giving up” anything in the name of “caring” they are making one of the most inexpensive investments you can make in your company’s productivity.
6. Offer Frequent, Specific Feedback
Feedback is the way that employees learn what they are doing right, what they are doing wrong and how their work is being received by those who use it. When employees get feedback that is infrequent, generic, or negative, they have no way of knowing whether they are doing okay or whether anything they do matters.
Feedback should be timely, specific and balanced if possible, and given in a sincere spirit of development. If employees receive this kind of feedback them regularly, they will know what they need to change all along, rather than waiting until an annual review to find out they have been missed.
7. Be Honest About and Reward Performance
Perhaps the most consistently under-used driver of productivity any manager has at his or her command is recognition. The science that underlies motivation is easy. We are more focused, more dedicated and more productive when we see evidence that our efforts have been noticed and felt appreciated than we are when we don’t.
It is possible to exploit recognition without the need for complex algorithms and large capital investments. The simple compulsion to pay attention to excellence in the moment, and calling it forth quickly, should point to the result, to the effort, to the person.
8. Promote Autonomy and Build Trust
Of all the predatory behaviors that can undermine performance, micromanagement is probably the most damaging, and yet the least acknowledged. Hands-off management often causes employees who are not trusted to run their own businesses to withhold their professional judgment and to start pushing their work through.
Workers who are watched over the shoulder are less motivated, work slower and produce poorer quality than when they are left to work autonomously on a task, within the boundaries of clear goals and individual accountability for outcomes.
9. Promote Professional Development
Development people are people who develop for longer. More ability. More presence. And ultimately, more of the work they love doing already.
Training programs, mentoring relationships, subsidized attendance at conferences and courses, stretch assignments and learning budgets all tell staff that their futures are important to the organization and their professional development is important. The return is in upskilled employees, and in commitment to keep working relationships.
10. Develop a Culture of Psychological Safety
At the end of the day, culture trumps the specific management practice in terms of making the biggest difference in team productivity. Google’s Project Aristotle research Perhaps the most comprehensive research ever conducted on team performance has revealed that the strongest single indicator of how successful a team was psychological safety, which is defined as “people’s perceptions of the interpersonal risk inherent in their team”.
Teams that have psychological safety “learn faster, with less friction and stay more innovative, engaging and resilient” than teams that focus on self-promotion and conformity. It starts with what leaders expect from their subordinates, how much they recognize mistakes, and how much conflict and dissent are modeled as normal and healthy.
Productivity is not taken away from people. We believe these ten practices are the most reliable and most evidence-based means of creating such an environment. It is grown through creating the environment where individuals are enabled to do their best and.
