Why Employees At Apple And Google Are More Productive

Employees’ productiveness is very important for every company, not only Google, Apple or other billion-dollar companies.

Even if you have a small company, a medium one, or a large enterprise, even a 10% increase in your employees’ can be the difference between having a good year or a bad one.

You might say that 10% it’s not that much, but, what if that 10% increase in productiveness would lead to a 10% increase in overall revenues and a 10% decrease in expenses?

That’s a 20% increase in your profits! This sum of money might be the one that will give you the edge and help you overcome your competition.

So, do you still think a 10% increase in productiveness is a small thing? Chances are you don’t.

Whether you are an entrepreneur looking to improve your company’s overall productiveness, a team leader looking to boost your team’s results or just a regular employee looking to pitch these ideas to your organization’s leaders, you should take a look at the following ideas. Then, you should analyze the way these ideas can be implemented inside your organizations.

Ok, enough introductory phrases and explanations! Now, let’s see why employees at Apple and Google are more productive.

1. They Feel at Home During Work Hours

Before we dive deeper into this subject, you should think back one or two decades, and the way offices used to look like back then. Are you thinking about huge rooms with thousands of one-person cubicles and dull meeting rooms every here and there? Is that what you would like to see when you arrive at work?

Large open spaces are useful because they give the sense of space, freedom, you don’t want to have a claustrophobic office. Regarding the cubicles, if you have such things in your office, you should just throw them out the window.

Employees at Google and Apple have increased productivity because when they are at the office they feel like home. Take a look at this office, wouldn’t you feel more productive if you’d work from or have meetings in this office?

*Cool Office Photo*

By feel at home, we don’t only refer to the fact that the offices emit warmth, coziness, they have all the cool gadgets you might think of: cool coffee machine, fully equipped kitchen, showers or game rooms. Feel at home is more than that. It’s about the activities that happen during the day: gamification, extracurricular activities, such as massage, internal competitions, Secret Santa, etc.

Make your employees feel like home and they will reward you with increased productivity.

2. Star Employees in Vital Company Roles

Another important thing you should learn from companies such as Apple or Google is the fact that you don’t need to distribute your star employees vertically, so you have one at every level of your organization. These star players need to be distributed horizontally and they need to be placed in key positions.

Why? Because if you think about the lower levels of your organization, a star employee would lose lots of time by helping newbies and he won’t have enough time or energy to focus on the crucial aspects of your business. Meanwhile, these newbies need to help each other and learn what a team is and how they should collaborate constantly. After a period of time, leaders will start to be defined inside these teams and those, my friend, are your next star employees which will go up the ladder of your organization.

3. Keep Organizational Drag to a Minimum

Once companies grow processes inside them tend to be more and more complicated. Instead of focusing on the work they need to get done, your employees will focus on unnecessary paperwork, meetings, and bureaucracy.

For you to keep the organizational drag to a minimum is very important to invest in your employees constantly and make sure they are fully aware of your company’s mission, vision, and business goals. Then, you can remove a large part of this organizational drag and replace it with trust. You need to trust the personal judgment of your employees more than you trust your bureaucratic processes.

Only when you reached this point, the drag will start to decrease and your employees’ productiveness can increase by almost 25%. Yes, that’s correct, 25%!

4. Engaged Employees

An engaged employee is an employee who doesn’t come to work for the sake of coming to work and cashing in a paycheck at the end of the month. An engaged employee is the one who comes to work because he really loves what he does and the organization he belongs to is inspiring for him, and he feels like it offers him the needed opportunities to evolve both professionally and personally.

Here’s how you can engage your employees:

• Know Them

Even if you have a few hundred employees you can always get to know a large part of them. For example, tell your human resources representative to let you know when employees in your organization have birthdays and take 10 minutes out of your time to get to say ‘Happy Birthday!’ and get to know them

• Offer them the Needed Tools to Evolve

Evolution is a very important aspect for most employees. That’s because, apart from the salary they get at the end of the month, they also need to see the results of their work and the way they evolved over the last period of time.

That’s why workshops and training are very important. A very basic thing you can do is to incentivize your more experienced employees to hold a presentation for juniors on certain topics they are good at. If they think they lack the presentation skills, an essay writer service can help him create a top-notch presentation.

• Recognize Their Hard Work

You’d be amazed how impactful a congratulation can be. Even though they might now the fact that you are very pleased with their work, your employees also need to hear it from you. That’s why, from time to time, make sure you remind them of the fact that they are doing a great job and that you are proud of what they’ve achieved for your company.

5. 4 Day Working Week

Recently a one-month long experiment was held by the Japanese subsidiary of Microsoft. During this month, the employees were only working four days a week. The motto of this experiment was “Work a short time, rest well, and learn a lot”.

The results of this experiment were very revealing. Apart from the fact that employees got a better work-life balance, their happiness level skyrocketed. These aspects lead to great results for the company because the overall productiveness of the employees increased by more than 40%. The meetings tended to get shorter and more effective, the tasks were finished in less time than usual, and the overall impact on the company’s activity was very encouraging.

If you want to experiment with your employees and try to find the best solution to increase their productivity, even though this method might seem quite drastic, you could try it for a month and see what happens. This is not the only example of managers taking this decision and giving very encouraging feedback regarding it. You should try this also!

Conclusion

Employees’ productivity is a very important aspect of the wellbeing of a company because a very productive employee can work as much as two demotivated ones. For you to improve your organization’s overall productivity is very important to find some ideas from your ‘bigger brothers’, such as Google, Apple or similar companies.

As a team leader or manager is very important to make your employees or colleagues feel like home when they come to work. Here, we are talking both about the office design and the atmosphere inside the working place.

Other aspects you should keep in mind are the organizational drag, the way you organize your company, and, last but not least, you should try a 4-day working week and see the results such an event has on your employees.

About the Author: Susan Saurel is a full-time digital marketer. Susan lives in Mountain View, California but she spends most of her spare time traveling around the United States in her minivan and meeting new people and cultures. As a passionate content writer, Susan is eager to share the professional experience and inspiring ideas with her readers.