It’s a well-known fact that business owners want teams of efficient, engaged, and motivated employees. So high productivity has become the imperative of today’s business world, that both managers and employees want to achieve and maintain. However, statistics show that only 26% of workers complete all the tasks planned daily.
You may wonder what almost 80% of employees are doing wrong when they fail to meet daily goals?
This article will try and offer answers to this question, identifying common mistakes people make that ruin their productivity, and showing you how to help your employees avoid these to become more productive.
They Overestimate the Amount of Effective Work Time
A typical workday consists of a number of complex tasks like creative projects, strategic thinking, or skills improvement that require time, dedication, and deep focus combined with simple tasks you do along the way. This said employees tend to be optimistic when they assume they’ll have enough time to tackle these, overlooking smaller tasks or distractions like emails or Slack, which can be serious time stealers.
So if you want to show workers what activities take chunks of their precious time, start using efficient time trackers like Workpuls. This app will show you and your employees how they spend their time at work, pointing out the productivity issues that prevent them from reaching their goals.
Once they know when they’re the most productive, employees will be able to organize their work hours better, tackling demanding tasks when they are fully focused, and leaving the smaller ones for later. Also, they may give up multitasking as one of the major distractors that ruin focus and performance.
They Don’t Make Clear Daily Plans
Ironic as it may be, employees often overlook the simple and full proof solutions for boosting productivity. The first effective solution is to make a daily work plan by identifying when and where to do a task and how to overcome potential obstacles that can come their way.
The second simple solution is to limit the number of decisions employees make.
By following these simple steps, employees can achieve more within a shorter time span, knowing at all times what the following step should be. Simple planning can improve their productivity, making them feel less frustrated and overwhelmed.
Point out to your employers that making “old-fashioned” step-by-step plans may be a perfect solution for their productivity boost, and encourage them by making similar weekly team goals.
They Forget How to Do Repetitive but Infrequent Tasks
Your employees may be used to tackling certain day-to-day tasks effectively while struggling with doing some repetitive things from time to time. Therefore, they can spend more time than usual to finish certain jobs only because they’ll need to remind themselves of the steps to take to do them.
If you want to prevent these delays from happening and keep your workers efficient and focused on their work, you can create different step-by-step instructions regarding various tasks your employees need to do from time to time. Then you can make these simple instructions easily accessible to your teams by storing them on shared drives.
In this way, your employees will know where to look for quick reminders, the next time some of these tasks come their way.
They Aren’t Aware of the Negative Effect of Small Time Leaks
We all know how improving your skills and working on major creative projects can boost our motivation and work performance. At the same time, many employees tend to underestimate the negative impact small-time leaks can have on their focus and productivity.
They may do this in various ways, by answering an email that didn’t require an urgent response, or attending a meeting unrelated to their work. All these time-wasting activities may not have a long-term effect on their performance, but they may disrupt employees’ focus, leaving them feeling frustrated about not reaching set goals.
You can make a series of systematic changes, like streamlining processes and simplifying tasks by automating or outsourcing them to free your employees from these common traps and improve their time management. By doing this, you’ll enable them to focus on their priorities, avoiding various distractions that can harm their productivity.
