Throughout every workplace, there are many ways employees fail to make decisions efficiently and where they do not make the most productive use of time during the workday.
As a hugely underestimated opportunity, employees are typically not equipped with the knowledge to increase and optimise their productivity at work. It should be a joint effort between the organisation senior executive, line managers, and individual employees to ensure they are set up for success with the resources they need to succeed, and the soft skills needed to utilize their time and energy much more effectively.
Investing in productivity skills within workforces is a crucial method to enhancing all aspects of a company’s performance outputs and profit. Through simple learning and development methods like training modules, improved toolkits, and engaging meetings, companies can be several steps closer to improving efficiency and performance growth.
These are seven reasons why investing in productivity skills should not be underestimated:
- Unlock New Talent and Performance Outcomes within Current Workforce
By developing your employees skills, this would allow your company to unlock growth from existing resources, whilst improving retention and saving on the costs of recruitment.
- Engage Employees
Engaging employees is a crucial factor to a company because it enables them to be excited about their work. When employees feel like they have the opportunity to grow their skills or are given the resources to learn something new, they are proven to become more optimistic, motivated, and energised about their work environment. Through both encouraging co-worker relationships and a sense of purpose within employees, they are more likely to produce better results and continue their aspirations at the company. In more recent years, companies have increasingly strengthened their employee engagement– some going from less than 20% to over 70% engagement (Gallup). This often involves a range of methods from improving inclusion, communications, reward, career development, productivity training and much more.
- Educates Managers
When managers are kept accountable for ensuring their employees are continuing learning and development, they will also learn how to educate their employees and find proven ways to motivate them and increase performance outputs. Improved L&D support, communications, and understanding with employees will allow managers to further understand their team’s strengths and weaknesses to identify further growth opportunities to everyone’s advantage. According to Gallup’s research, 52% of Americans who utilize their strengths for three hours are shown to be less stressed than the average employee, which brings multiple benefits towards performance uplift, retention, and cost savings. Check out ‘The Strengthener Trio’ in my free eBook with simple, yet powerful steps to unlock employee and business growth.
- Practices Effective Company-Wide Collaboration
Through leveraging unique online systems, expert workshops and transformation coaching programmes to skyrocket productivity outputs within the company, it allows for a sense of company-wide teamwork that encourages continuous improvement in a growth mindset, and learning. Offering the best practices and great examples or case stories creates a distinct image for what a highly engaged team should look like –thus encouraging others to aspire to and work towards emulating that image.
- Reduces Staff Turnover
According to the Work Institute’s 2021 Retention Report, the most common reasons for employee turnover rate were due to career issues entailing low opportunities for growth and achievement. However, companies have begun to prioritize employee retention through offering opportunities for learning and development to their employees. Employee turnover rates have been shown to steadily decrease throughout all different industries. Thus, enabling employees to achieve increased outputs from their work will fuel them to feel more empowered and encouraged to continue their careers at their current company.
- Improves Company Performance
Increasing employee engagement and productivity allows companies to increase their company output and performance against their competitors. It really can be an additional competitive edge. When employees are given opportunities for learning, they are more likely to be more innovative and profitable in their positions. According to MIT’s Sloan Centre for Information Systems Research, the companies rated in the top two quartiles for employee experience were shown to have double the revenue from new products and services produced within the last 2 years. This signifies that companies who emphasize investing in their employees do strengthen their company revenue streams.
- Enhanced Human Capital
When employees are constantly encouraged and enabled to develop their skill set and growth, their knowledge becomes increasingly more valuable within the company. While continuing to earn wages, employees are also offered the opportunity to gain skills that they will utilize for the rest of their careers. Therefore, inputting innovative ways to learn allows for businesses to push their employees whilst increasing loyalty.
To wrap up this content piece and help you take smarter action, start by picking one or maybe two actions. Maybe this could be an action to implement something new that the article taught you, or maybe it was a reminder of something you already knew, but either you forgot about it, slipped back into old, less productive habits, or simply are not using it as often and consistently as you should to optimise the impact on how well you use your time.
Whatever you start with, choose wisely, and fight temptation to rush into the next task or meeting. A little bit of time regularly, to make better decisions, is proven to go a long way.
Need a bit more help, or have a question? Get in touch, I love to help and meet new people. You are welcome to contact me through my personal website: https://darylwoodhouse.com/ anytime.
You also have free access to my highly rated eBook ‘4 Life Work Effect Pillars to Smarter Hybrid Working’ here, which includes more than 50 easy to action best practices that you, and your colleagues can choose from at your leisure on the way to enjoying less stress, improved life work balance, and greater performance results.
Know someone else who might benefit from reading this? You could make a big difference to their life, career, or organisation by forwarding this to them. It is good to help others – we can all do more of it with just a few seconds or minutes of our time!
Kind regards
Daryl Woodhouse
CEO | Executive Coach | L&D, Productivity, and Change Leader
Access my latest eBook here with practical tips for getting the best from hybrid working.
Daryl Woodhouse, aka ‘The Smarter Work Pro helps organisations to optimise ROI whilst enabling individuals and teams to achieve more and live happier.
