Productivity and business’s growth are positively related. Higher productivity results in speedy growth.

Productivity is something that should not be ignored by any business. In reality, remarkable productivity across the spectrum has been observed to be a critical element to the growth of the business.

Higher productivity can help you to achieve the following benefits:

• Higher Profitability
• Employee Welfare
• Higher Returns to Stakeholders
• Better Relationships between Management and Employees
• Customer Satisfaction
• Higher credit Rating
• Corporate Image
• Better Terms for Suppliers
• Less Employee Turnover

Therefore, one of the best things that you can do to make your business better is to increase your and your team’s productivity. Many tools are available these days to increase productivity by managing the work schedules of employees such as free work schedule maker.

There are two ways of achieving growth. You can achieve the same by either increasing your productivity or by spotting and solving the factors affecting productivity.

Scan through your process and shift out unwanted tasks, duplicate tasks, and time-consuming insignificant tasks. This will make the entire chain simpler, convenient, and easier to follow. The time yielded, as a result, can be shifted towards tasks that matter more from the business perspective.

When your productivity increases, you can do more at the same time, you will be able to make higher profits and higher more workers. This way you will increase your growth and in the wider picture, you are polishing your business’s future.

There are lots of ways to improve your business’s productivity, however, here I am stating 5 easiest ways to improve your business productivity.

1.  Automation:

The goal here is to automate all the tasks that you can.

Do you feel that the day is too short for your work to be completed?

Do you wish to have a day longer than 24 hours?

If your answer to both or any one of the following questions is yes, automation can be the best option for you.

According to The Productivity Institute, 20% of the average workday is spent on “crucial” and “important things”, while 80% of the average workday is spent on things that have “little value” or “no value”.

This is the main reason why you feel that the day is short as you are utilizing your crucial time on things that are less important or of no value, you are doing some tasks that can be automated. i.e. Done by the computer, these tasks do not need critical thinking or human touch.

The majority of your tasks in your project milestones can be considered for automation. These include social media scheduling, sending out promotional emails, blog content posting, automated software that can send and receive invoices, collection of lead-generation data, creating backups, etc.

All these chores need to be done, right? Now either you will do all these chores or you will make your employees do them. The thing is that your productivity is low due to your poor planning. You are making a human to do a job that is boring as well as not that important. If some work can be automated, and you are not doing so, you are wasting your mind, energy, and time on something that is not worth it.

If you want to increase your productivity, I am sure that you have much more on your plate than you can handle, and in this case, automation is the best extra plate that you can have.

• • Automation helps in freeing up your time and attention, so you can shift them to important ones.
  • As a computer does the work, you are sure that you will get the right results and on time.
  • It reduces the risk of important things falling from the cracks.
  • It reduces the stress and boredom that is caused by doing repetitive work.
  • Finally, you can do more work and the 24 hour day is now enough for you.

The key is to not consider automation as a luxury, but consider it as a source through which you can focus on all the important and crucial tasks.

2.  Please Stop Multitasking:

Believing that you can do more work if you do multitasking is just like believing that you should be a good child if you want Santa Claus to give you a gift on Christmas, you know what I mean.

According to a study by Harvard Business Review, multitasking is impossible and you should probably stop trying to do it. Multitasking leads to as much as a 40% drop in productivity, increased stress, and a 10% drop in IQ.

A task needs your focus and skills to be completed, and when you are doing more than one task at a time, you are focusing on none of the tasks. When a task is done with 100% focus, it can be completed far faster than when you try to multitask.

While multitasking, you are doing nothing other than just quickly shifting between incomplete tasks.

To avoid multitasking try the following tips listed below:

• • Don’t look at your phone while working
  • Eliminate outside distractions
  • Provide yourself some time for outside distractions
  • List your priorities and work according to your project scheduling
  • Be mindful (Be physically and mentally present)
  • Don’t be afraid to say NO
  • Keep your desk area/office clean
  • Strengthen your focus
  • Uni-task for your most important work during your prime time
  • Use apps to avoid distraction.

Delete the word multitasking from your dictionary and just focus on one task at a time.

3.  Rewards:

We humans do not value what we already have. We always want more.

We should use this theory to get more done and at a faster rate. According to this theory, both you and your employees are likely to work harder and faster when there are rewards in exchange.

If going easy on work and working hard, both have the same returns, why work hard? If you want the employees to take the project scope seriously, you need to motivate them to work hard by giving them appropriate rewards.

If the team achieves a certain milestone, it should be celebrated and the hard workers should be rewarded. This will not only boost their morale but will also increase their productivity.

An average worker sends and receives more than 180 messages a day, due to the lack of seriousness towards work, but the same worker will ignore these messages when he is motivated enough.

Although you should not reward always for ore or extra work, you should also reward them for the regular work they do. Here I am not talking about monetary awards, but about intangible rewards, like setting the working hours in such a way that all the employees have time for themselves too.

A person at some point or another will definitely grow tired of the daily routine of waking up, going to the office, coming back home for eating and sleeping, and then repeating the cycle.

Provide them with enough time so that they can rest and enjoy their lives too. The best employer is the one that understands this as it makes the employees happy and which in turn increases their productivity, and this also reduces employee churn rates. When someone feels better, they work better.

4.  Use Tasks and Project Management Tools:

Remember as a child we were told to create and work according to a timetable to make better use of our time and day.

Well the IT sector has improvised that timetable and have created a better timetable as a work management tool for us adult children.

A well-planned work, project, or day is always more productive. Therefore, plan your to-do list and work accordingly. “Email isn’t an ideal method of communication or collaboration on teams,” says Dave Nevogt of Hubstaff. You can utilize Wrike or wrike alternative SmartTask, or you can choose from n number of software available, according to your workflow. By choosing the right software you are buying accountability and proper workflow for your business.

By using such software, you can be clear on the timelines, objectives, role-wise tasks, critical assessment areas, priorities, and other material essential to the smooth progress of the project or your work. There are various Trello alternatives are available now that can help you manage your work in a better way.

5.  Make Realistic Goals:

The work that you do should be strategically aligned and the goals for the same should be realistic.

You will not be able to achieve much with smaller goals, therefore you will try to make and achieve bigger objectives, but the thing here is to create an objective that is achievable and strategically aligned at the same time.

If it is not done correctly, you are making an unachievable goal. Therefore it doesn’t matter how harder or faster the team works, there’s no point. But, if you set a realistic goal, the team will have the goal in-sight and will work harder and faster to achieve it as soon as possible.

Therefore there is a chance that if you incorporate these tips carefully, you can blow your growth and business productivity off the roof.

About the Author:

Shyamal is the Founder of SmartTask, an online work management tool that’s helping teams be more productive by having clarity on who’s doing what by when. Has a penchant for researching and sharing strategies that could benefit a team’s productivity.