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Whatever your work goals are whether they involve more team collaboration, more sales, or higher profits, increasing productivity plays a role in those achievements. Most leaders, however, don’t realize how they could be stifling their employees’ productivity in the way they manage or contribute to their company culture. Discover the three of the most common ways you might be hurting productivity in the workplace:
A happier work culture develops with strong and frequently made personal, emotional connections. Why? Because people are willing to work harder and to commit to organizations that their friends are a part of. It’s one thing to disappoint your boss, but another to let a friend down.
According to Gallup’s 2017 State of the Workplace report, if 6 in 10 U.S employees had a best friend at work, organizations could realize 36% fewer safety incidents, 7% more engaged customers, and 12% higher profit.
How can you start cultivating PECs today? Here are some of our suggestions:
Ask your teams about their personal goals and aspirations
Surprise a colleague with a small gift
Give recognition to someone on your team at your next meeting
Related: The Easiest, No-Cost Activity Used to Build Team Connectedness
Bestselling author and psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi named the concept of ‘flow’, which is known as a highly focused mental state. Have you ever worked on a task and were just totally ‘in the zone’? The difference between working a lot and being in flow is that the latter brings you genuine satisfaction when you’re continuing to make progress.
Here are some common ways you can interrupt someone’s flow at work:
Having too many meetings and not enough independent working time
Stopping by or instant messaging them to make impromptu requests
Changing the priority of different projects at the last minute
Even though we work remotely, our DH team has to set boundaries to make sure we aren't being interrupted with Slack messages. Since we're all accustomed to working independently, we all have to figure out how we can best manage communication at a distance and maintain 'flow'.
Raise your virtual hand if you’ve been guilty of sending an email after work hours or while on vacation? Even worse, have you requested a response of a team member or colleague while they were out-of-office?
Not only can this behavior bite into your culture, but it can pressure your employees to always be in ‘work mode’ when they’re trying to achieve a healthy work-life balance. You can’t have a balance if your mind is always thinking about work! Not giving your employees a break will sooner or later result in burnout, which can negatively affect productivity and hurt the way your teams see their work.
So as a manager, if you’re texting, calling, emailing when your employees are not working, save your thoughts for 9am on Monday morning.
Related: How to Identify a Toxic Workplace Culture
What could a more productive and engaged workplace do for your bottom line? Discover more:
