Productivity in the workplace is so important. The price tag for lost productivity is a whopping $544 billion each year. If your team isn’t productive, you lose out on valuable working hours, and will have difficulty meeting milestones and goals. Fortunately, there are several things you can do to improve productivity within the office. With that in mind, here are five tips for improving workplace productivity:
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Clean Up the Clutter
There are several studies that have determined how clutter has a negative impact on your productivity. In the workplace, clutter can happen very naturally. Things pile up, and staff gets busy. But a cluttered desk or office can thwart your ability to work productively, dampen your mood, and create stress. This is why it’s so important to provide your team with the tools they need to clean clutter and keep their spaces organized. Give them the organizers, paper trays, file cabinets, and other items necessary to keep things tidy. You can even make an event out of office cleanups; perhaps once per quarter, your team will spend half a day cleaning and organizing their spaces (and cleaning up their digital space, too).
Use Project Manage Tools
Project management tools are a great way to help streamline tasks and boost productivity among individuals and teams. Tools like Basecamp, Asana, Trello, and Wunderlist are all great apps that help manage projects and day-to-day operations. It’s important to try out free trials for a handful of platforms to determine which works best for you. Some tools also have easy integration with messaging platforms you might already be using. For example, both Trello and Asana can be integrated directly into Slack, one of the most popular messaging systems for offices.
Offer Some Privacy
Today’s innovative businesses are changing the way they curate collaborative spaces by having open office concepts. However, it’s important to understand that open office concepts aren’t always the answer: many employees actually prefer a bit of privacy. An extensive study found that the open office workplace design actually yielded less human-to-human interaction.
Compared to traditional office setups, employees who worked in open floor plan setups had email and instant messaging usage that was up by 67%, and there were 73% less time spent with face-to-face interactions. Previous research has found that open floor plans made it difficult for employees to concentrate on their work and focus—especially when it came to brainstorming, number crunching, and working on high-level projects that require deeper levels of concentration.
“To help improve productivity, talk to your staff about how you can aid their privacy and consider their input as you rework your workplace and office flow,” says ROSI Office System, a company that produces some of the best priced cubicles in Houston.
Bring the Outside In
Incorporating nature into your office is a unique way to boost productivity among your staff. It’s no secret that nature helps people better connect with their environment and with themselves. When you connect with nature, you can improve your mood, your cognition, your sense of well-being, and your health. As John Muir once famously said, “I only went out for a walk, and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.”
Adding a bit of foliage doesn’t just bring in a nice creative touch to the space. In the business world, plants are also known for their ability to improve productivity. A study from Harvard analyzed the results of productivity across 10 high-performances offices in the United States, and found that those who worked in green environments had better cognitive function, information usage, strategy planning, and crisis response.
The study states, “They found that cognitive performance scores for the participants who worked in the green+ environments were, on average, double those of participants who worked in conventional environments; scores for those working in green environments were 61% higher.
Put the Phone Away
Even when you think simple glances towards your phone throughout the day don’t matter, the truth is, it adds up. One report, titled “Smartphone addiction, daily interruptions and self-reported productivity,” found that smartphones have a negative impact on productivity in the workplace. This is because it disrupts the natural flow of a person’s work task. Your workflow pertains to the interrupted dedication to a something specific, and just a one second interruption could change that flow completely.
About Carson Derrow
