What manager wouldn't want all company employees to be engaged, motivated, and productive? Besides significantly improving the organizational climate and team interaction, these factors are directly related to a business's profitability, so ensuring greater productivity should be a priority.
Assessing and optimizing the organizational climate is one of the most effective strategies for companies seeking to improve employee productivity. In this sense, we need to understand what organizational climate is and how it is structured within a business.
What can influence employee productivity?
The quality of the work environment is affected by several factors and has a direct influence on employee satisfaction, quality of life, and performance. This means that the better the atmosphere in this environment, the more productive the worker will be and, consequently, the better the results obtained.
According to data collected by The Conference Board, a Brazilian worker takes an average of one hour to complete a task that an American worker takes fifteen minutes to finish. According to this research, this enormous discrepancy in results is due to problems with technology and excessive bureaucracy, which is so ingrained in our reality.
With the advancement of digital transformation, companies are finding their activities increasingly tied to the virtual world. Although the internet is one of the most important tools today, it is also a vast field of randomness and continuous distractions, causing workers' productivity to suffer an ever-increasing impact. Time spent on the internet on activities unrelated to the business is stealing productivity and harming the performance of workers in businesses of all segments.
Innovation to improve employee productivity
Aiming to combat this significant loss of productivity, many companies are implementing considerable changes in their approach to employees. Examples of this are startups, which invest in a stance focused on employee satisfaction and a higher quality of life.
From initiatives ranging from happy hour within the company to allowing pets during work hours, these companies are demonstrating how a happy employee makes a happy company. Often, these changes don't require a large investment, but promise to deliver significant results in terms of increased productivity. Check out the Exame on productivity within startups and the results obtained with this type of initiative.
Although the qualifications of professionals are an extremely relevant aspect at the time of hiring, it is important to know how this value will be applied in practice. Many companies end up with a highly qualified but very unproductive workforce, which results in a high and, in a way, wasted investment.
It's also important to remember that a productive worker isn't always delivering good results. To achieve this, managers need to have more assertive control over the positive and negative factors that help employees deliver better results.
To better understand the relationship between productivity and quality, check out this video from the Sebrae channel:
What are the main obstacles to productivity at work?
But the question remains: what are the main obstacles to employee productivity? To help you understand, we've outlined the key points that can cause your employees to produce less – check them out!
Lack of job satisfaction
Employee dissatisfaction is one of the biggest factors impacting productivity, and this happens for a very simple reason: if a person enjoys what they do, they will do it with much more dedication and love, and deliver increasingly better results. When an employee shows frustration or dissatisfaction, the first sign that something is wrong will be in their productivity.
This dissatisfaction can be caused by problems with other employees, a deteriorating organizational climate, devaluation, communication problems with leaders and managers, lack of perspective, among many other issues.
It is very important that managers are able to identify these factors and establish effective measures to resolve this type of situation. Most of the time, an open and receptive dialogue can help to understand these situations and determine the best approach.
Lack of communication
As mentioned in the previous topic, communication problems between teams and leaders can have a major impact on worker productivity. Just as outside of work, people want to be heard and have their issues, complaints, and suggestions validated by the company.
In addition to improving the organizational climate, good communication helps to avoid errors and failures in processes, since everyone will have access to clear and specific information about the tasks to be performed.
Failing to provide consistent feedback
All employees want to know their leaders' perception of the tasks they are performing. And this isn't just about correcting mistakes, but also about guiding, teaching, and valuing successes. This type of communicative approach helps bring more confidence and security to the employee, who will then perform tasks with more dedication.
In addition to increasing productivity, frequent feedback also helps the company avoid losing top talent and reduces employee turnover.
Lack of concentration
Providing focus is almost an essential aspect for companies that want to increase employee productivity. Excessive interruptions cause workers to become easily distracted and negatively impact the results delivered.
While an open and spacious environment fosters good communication and interaction among the team, it's important to find a balance that allows for a positive working relationshipwithout causing excessive distractions during tasks. A strong indication that these environments can negatively impact employee performance is the significant increase in productivity seen in many companies when employees transitioned to working from home.
Constant connectivity
It's essential to know how to properly separate what belongs to the work environment from what belongs to personal life, so that these two aspects don't mix. When this separation doesn't happen, the worker ends up tense, stressed, and anxious, and as a result, their productivity is completely undermined.
Lack of training
Knowing what you're doing is essential for a worker to be productive and deliver the expected performance. For this reason, it is very important to ensure that your workers are prepared to meet the demands required by the company, and this is only possible by guaranteeing a training program that includes workshops, courses, lectures, etc.
Internet distractions
Although the internet has revolutionized the way we do many things, both in our personal lives and in the corporate world, it can also be a major obstacle for those seeking more focus and productivity in their daily lives. Being a space of endless possibilities, the internet can cause workers to waste valuable time on:
- Social media;
- Entertainment websites;
- Emails for personal use;
- E-commerce;
- Between others.
And it's undeniable: this type of content is a huge time drain. Without realizing it, hours pass without anything productive being done during that time. Therefore, internet use during work hours can significantly harm employee productivity. In this sense, it's important to have a tool that allows for greater control over internet access and helps the company increase productivity among its employees.
Is unproductivity a point of no return?
We know that in the face of the digital transformation we are experiencing, many changes have revolutionized our routines, and the way we work today is completely different from what it was a few years ago. However, all these resources and tools can bring many advantages when used intelligently, as is the case with the internet.
It is important that the company and the responsible managers prioritize helping to establish a healthier organizational climate, helping employees to increase their productivity.
