How can an employee be efficient?

One thing that almost all companies have in common is an interest in enhancing their performance in some way.

Increasing productivity in the workplace is one of the most effective ways to accomplish this goal. In the workplace, efficiency is achieved when individuals carry out the appropriate activities in the appropriate manner, with the least amount of waste in terms of time and effort.

Helping people work smarter, rather than longer, is at the heart of every effort to increase productivity in the workplace. Therefore, with the same number of resources, more can be produced (that is, more customers can be helped, more money can be made, more goods and services can be provided, and the firm can expand). Efficient workers are productive. They are able to effectively manage their time and efforts in order to finish things on schedule.

The levels of employee productivity and efficiency in the workplace are influenced by a variety of elements, including the work environment, the leadership, the level of job satisfaction, the training, the procedures, and the culture. When it comes to teaching workers how to maximize the use of their time, one of the most effective strategies is to make adjustments to the culture of the day-to-day operations of the company.

Both effectiveness and culture are long-term strategic considerations, and they are inextricably linked to one another. You will be able to cultivate a culture that makes the most of your resources, both human and financial, if you provide your workers with the training they need to be efficient on an individual level and the framework they need to be efficient as a group.

The following are three suggestions for improving workplace culture in order to boost productivity:

1. Understand Personal Time Management

We live in a time where people are easily distracted by technology. Employees now have access to a greater amount of information than ever before because to the technological tools that are accessible today.

Accelerating the flow of information may seem to be a step in the right direction toward achieving increased productivity at first glance. However, there is a cost associated with this high-speed information, and that cost is a rise in the number of distracting digital alerts as well as an expectation that a quick answer would be given.

Because attention is the money used in the digital age, organizations that deal in technology do all they can to garner as much of it as they possibly can.

A recent example from one person's accidental Facebook hiatus illustrates the principle of limiting distractions: over the course of the ten days that he went without logging into the social media platform, Facebook sent the author 17 emails trying to get his attention. This is an illustration of the principle of limiting distractions.

These were photographs of individuals he had just met briefly, a meme that was posted in a group by more than 600 people, and several other pieces of inconsequential information that he would ordinarily scroll right by if he were on his Facebook page.

Why can seemingly little bits of information have such a powerful ability to divert our attention? It is tempting to imagine that we would have a brief moment to keep up with little duties and personal interests when we are in the midst of more demanding work since technology "saves" so much time.

But even as technology saves time on the one hand, it takes it away on the other in the form of minor distractions. And each of these micro-distractions has a larger time cost than the few seconds it takes to check social media or retweet a meme: a study conducted by the University of California, Irvine found that it took up to 20 minutes to return to work after a single distraction.

You may recall the helpful suggestions included in this article on personal time management activities for workers; nevertheless, the issue that really needs to be answered is this: how can you encourage individuals in your firm to engage in such time management practices?

The availability of cellphones makes it more difficult to exercise self-control when it comes to avoiding diversions online. Companies are moving away from email monitoring, and courts in the United States have ruled that it is against the law to restrict toilet breaks to just 90 seconds.

If you were as astonished to learn about the 90-second toilet break rules as we were, that is a good thing; it indicates that you have at least some concept of what constitutes a decent work environment. It is possible that this is an extreme example; yet, it demonstrates how some businesses place a higher priority on fiscal efficiency than they do on any other issue, including how the employees are treated.

If you want your workers to continue to effectively manage their time without you looking over their shoulders, they need to take ownership of the process, and you need to provide them the freedom that they need in the workplace. Therefore, rather of wasting time and resources attempting to have leadership monitor workers' usage of various forms of media, you should concentrate on training your staff on how to effectively manage their time. This may require anything as easy as providing a lesson for sorting and filtering their work email, or it could involve something as exciting and complicated as setting up a business guild on a habit gamification app.

2. Cultivate an Effective Working Relationship

Training a team effectively may be seen as an extension of the concepts of efficient time management. Because, in all honesty, not all alerts originate from Facebook, making chances for team building a priority and training members of the team how to recognize and avoid distractions while on the job are both very helpful in this regard.

A request from a colleague for immediate assistance with anything may be just as disruptive to a person's productivity as receiving a text message on their phone.

This is the point when having a solid knowledge of the concepts behind effective time management connects with your culture. Do your staff demand rapid responses? What consequences are there for workers who do not answer immediately? What steps are taken when the request comes from someone in a position of authority? How do workers decide what tasks to prioritize throughout the course of the day?

Your staff will eventually learn how to respond to these queries regardless of whether or not you plan to address them in any way. People are going to do their best to live up to expectations despite the fact that there is a muddled combination of official rules and personal interpretations.

Employees are left with no alternative except to learn from experience, respond appropriately, and hope for the best if leadership does not clearly explain these expectations to them.

Be proactive in teaching your staff how to improve their efficiency at work rather than just responding to problems when they arise. It is crucial for teams to distribute tasks and be aware of the influence that this might have on the overall efficiency of the team:

The first thing that was required of workers was to take part in something called a "High Five," which required them to spend the first five minutes of each day writing down their responsibilities, ranking the top five, and reporting to an accountability partner. This daily exercise helped staff concentrate on what was most essential, rather than depending on what was at the top of their inboxes. Additionally, the process of planning out the day in advance made it evident whether there were too many things to accomplish. Because of this, workers were better able to determine whether or not they needed to delegate duties in the beginning of the day, when there was still time to fit them into the daily planning session, rather than as disruptions in the afternoon.

Second, we had each team determine how the work they did impacted a team that was downstream from them. For instance, our product development department gained a better understanding of how the scheduling and workflow of our marketing department are influenced by their timeline. Our marketing department, in turn, is responsible for preparing materials for our sales department.

Each team devised plans for enhancing the processes that had an impact on the other teams further downstream, and in turn, the upstream teams taught the downstream teams how to improve their ability to keep informed about occurrences that may have an impact on their job.

Our staff members were able to get more out of their days as a result of these straightforward exercises, which also helped them get a deeper comprehension of how their specific responsibilities fit into the larger scheme of things. Additionally, it assisted in the development of continuing dialogues around the procedures that involve several teams.

Conversations like this will look extremely different for any business since they are dependent on the organization's goal, vision, and values. But the employees will realize that delays and changes aren't meant to sabotage the efforts of others further along the chain of production the more they understand the structure of your organization and the more they realize that delays and changes aren't meant to sabotage the efforts of others further along the chain of production. This is something that we at Bamboo refer to as "Assuming the Best," and it is an essential component of how our company culture influences the effectiveness of our workplace.

3. Take the Initiative Regarding Performance

The preceding two pieces of advice concentrate on preventative actions that may be taken to foster a culture of trust inside your firm. If having an understanding makes up the first half of trust, then responsibility makes up the other half. Creating a culture of responsibility is the second proactive step toward enhancing productivity in the workplace. The third proactive step is to conduct frequent performance reviews.

Which of the following is more effective: detecting and reacting to difficulties on a frequent basis throughout the year, or offering in-depth feedback just once a year? It's possible that a once-a-year timetable would be the most effective way to assess remuneration, but the longer you wait to provide recognition and criticism, the longer you allow everyday inefficiencies of a smaller scale persist.

The problems that prevent workers from putting the concepts of time management and cooperation into practice may be helped to be resolved via the routine review and communication on performance.

If an employee is aware that her performance would be evaluated apart from that of others in her department, then she is also aware that there is no incentive for her to engage in office politics. Or, if a different worker understands that he does not need to shift responsibility when anything goes wrong since he is able to get assistance from his management without endangering his prospects for advancement, then he also knows that he does not need to seek support from his manager.

Once again, the discourse about how to raise productivity in the workplace has to concentrate on the fundamental driver of change, which is the development of the capacity and abilities of your people. This helps to put the time and resource expenses of performance management into its appropriate perspective, namely, as an investment in your people rather than a wasteful use of dollars.