4 Contributors to Poor Productivity (that You Should Avoid at All Costs)

Poor productivity may be costing you more than you realize: having disengaged workers costs organizations around $500 billion per year. If you haven’t considered how lack of efficiency or motivation has impacted your business, it’s time to assess whether you might be part of the problem.

1. Not Keeping Your Eye on the Big Picture

In order for employees to feel important, it helps for them to know that they are a critical part of the success of the company. To do this, managers must work with employees to identify key performance indicators (KPIs) that will be used to evaluate their success for their unique positions.

Show each employee how meeting her goals will help the overall organization. If her goal is hitting a certain number of sales or earning a fixed number of positive reviews, then show her how that will improve the company. Once you have these KPIs, monitor and then let employees know how well they are doing in meeting goals.

2. Lack of Supervision Skills

Some examples of managers lacking supervision skills include micromanaging, being inconsistent, and playing favorites. A common cause of poor productivity is when managers do not have the proper level of leadership to keep employees motivated and performing at peak potential. This can happen when an employee excels at a technical job and then is promoted to a position of leadership, but not given key management skills to help him do his job well.

Some managers micromanage to the point where employees are afraid to make a decision on their own without getting management’s approval. This slows down everyone’s productivity.

You may periodically have to talk to employees and determine if the manager is giving them what they need to be successful. It may be the managers need additional training so they can understand how to work better with employees. In the end, it’s a leader’s job to identify problems between management and employees and resolve any issues as they arise.

3. Not Enough Training

Low productivity can frequently be tracked back to employees not having enough training, both during the hiring process and on an ongoing basis. Employees that have been properly trained will be able to perform tasks with minimal supervision, so it’s worth the time and financial investment in training to ensure they feel empowered to do their jobs well.

Poor productivity can occur when one employee has to stop her regular work to fix the mistakes of another. This can cause both parties to get behind on their work and decrease productivity for an entire team. By providing proper training, you can ensure the employees are well-equipped to do their jobs quickly and correctly.

4. Meeting Overload

Who hasn’t suffered from having too many meetings that seem to drain the productivity right out of your day? Instead of being productive, people get pulled into meetings that break up their workday, stop productivity, and cause them to get less done.

To top it off, many times the meetings are attended by people who don’t have anything to do with the topic at hand and it ends up being more of a waste of time. Instead of calling another meeting, you may want to use a collaboration tool to help schedule, delegate work, track progress, etc. Short emails can be a great alternative to meetings as well.

Is it Your Company’s Culture?

Employees are human, so there will always be some loss of productivity in the workplace. We’ve all had days where we’re tired or upset about a problem at home, and that affects how much we get done in a day.

However, sometimes it’s more a problem with the culture of your company. By following these four simple suggestions, you can put a stop to the chronic poor productivity that may be plaguing your company.

Author Profile Jon Forknell is the Vice President and General Manager of Atlas Business Solutions, Inc., a software marketing company specializing in employee scheduling software, including ScheduleBase employee scheduling software, and other business software solutions. In the past, Jon has been recognized by the U.S. Small Business Administration as a SBA Young Entrepreneur of the Year. Atlas Business Solutions was named as one of Software Magazine’s Top 500 Software Companies in 2004 through 2007, and 2010, 2013, 2014, 2016 and 2017.