5 Effective Ways To Improve Employee Efficiency

Workplace efficiency is the difference between managing your business efficiently and getting done what you need to run your company and falling behind on obligations due to things being overlooked or missed entirely and falling through the gaps.

If that sounds familiar, you need to take a step back and look at how well you’re utilizing your workforce and what your employees are doing for you. It isn’t always a case of your employees being at fault, although this can be a cause for concern too; it is about how you are putting them to work and how they perform their job role.

Maximizing employee efficiency requires a multifaceted approach, and you need to be putting effective workplace management strategies in place to avoid miscommunication and reduce loss and waste. The following tips can help you to do just that.

Training

Ultimately, as an employer, you must ensure all employees are trained to do their job roles easily. This should be done as part of the onboarding process; however, effective training programs should be carried out periodically to ensure there are no gaps in knowledge and to update skills and new methods associated with your industry. Look into online training platforms to put effective training plans in place and to monitor and check on the progress so you can be sure everyone is up to speed or implement additional support if required. Implementing the best competency management system can help identify any skill gaps, and allow you to give additional support and training where necessary. Having these records can allow you to clamp down on rogue workers who are going outside of their training and making mistakes they are aware they needn’t be making that can affect your efficiency.

Utilize Skills

Every single person you employ will have different skill sets regardless of the job you employ them for. Pay attention to how they work and perform in their job roles and ensure you use each person to their strengths. Be it soft skills, technical skills, personal skills, and more, they can offer a lot to your company in terms of productivity and efficiency. Employees may shine providing advice over the phone or having a knack for the organization of schedules or even interpretation of data, for example. If you really wanted to get to the bottom of where your employees would shine, you could have them take a personality test like DiSC and then, once you have a picture of the different DiSC styles within your company, move employees around or change how you give them their work so that you can really get the most out of them.

Delegate

Effective delegation can free up your workload and increase efficiency across the board. By sharing our tasks and responsibilities between qualified and tested employees, you can increase efficiency and quality while allowing you to do more tasks that require your explicit attention.

Stop Multitasking

Think of multitasking like juggling. All is well when the balls are in the air and being handled correctly. But as soon as you drop one ball, what happens? All balls are dropped, and you have to pick everything up and start again. Multitasking might seem like the way forward, but this can divide your or your employee’s attention from the task at hand and lead things being unintentionally overlooked. Distribute tasks fairly and avoid overloading people’s schedules with a multitude of work they need to complete that can hinder their process. Stick to one thing at a time so everything is completed correctly and within the expected timeframe. If you do need to add to a workload, look at how it can be evenly distributed amongst staff members and bring more people on board to help you get work done without dripping everything.

Improve Communication

How you communicate with staff can directly correlate with their effectiveness at getting the job done. If you have a large area you work from, you may benefit from two way devices – such as radio handsets, to your business. This can ensure clear and concise communication at all times and ensure everyone is clear on what needs to be done. Changes to communication with staff should be filtered through all levels of the company, from owners and senior management to the customers, client base, and vendors, so that everyone is aware of changes being made. This way everyone can aim to move towards improving communication which will have a positive effect on the business.

You should utilize various communication options, from video calls to email, collaborative apps to convey messages, phone calls, and if your field is healthcare – electronic health records are a must.
But what is an EHR? Electronic health records is a software used throughout healthcare, to not only optimize communication but to gain access to patient medical records to review and update records. The software is also used to allocate work to admin staff, doctors, and secretaries, with many having direct instant messaging implemented and an emergency button should someone need urgent help.

Effective workplace communication needs to be delivered via both verbal and nonverbal methods, and how you deliver what needs to be said is just as important as what you are saying. Your communication through the company needs to be clear, to the point, and dependable so everyone can know what to expect regardless of their position or standing within the company.

Conclusion

Improving workplace efficiency needs to be taken seriously and something you are constantly looking at and adjusting for maximum results. Work together with your employees to find better ways of working, not against them, and this can help you to deliver better, more consistent results across the board.