Insights Into Micromanaging in 2024: The Productivity Plague

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The performance and productivity of your staff are important for your company to succeed. If the company’s leaders don’t maintain the staff’s experiences they will fall into a lull and experience a lag in the way they do work. This disrupts the business workflow and can end up affecting the overall productivity of the company.

When you take an active interest in your staff’s ability to perform well at work, you’ll also see improvements like attracting and retaining top talent, increased productivity, and fewer cases of absenteeism.

The Negative Effect of Poor Performance

As a leader, if you don’t see high levels of productivity, a lot of negative traits crop up among your staff.

• When you record high absenteeism rates among staff it’s often due to mental health-related reasons relating to stress at work.
• Burnout occurs as a result of stressful work-related factors like anxiety, depression, and poor motivation to do work.
• Boredom can happen because employees may find their work to be not challenging enough for them or they don’t find joy in their work anymore.
• High turnover rates happen because of employee dissatisfaction or poor performance. When employees get replaced at a high rate, it can be stressful for other staff members who are worried about their job security.

Why You Should Monitor Your Staff’s Performance

Before you make any changes to your operation, you need to know your employees’ current performance and productivity levels. You need to know their strengths, capabilities, and where they are falling behind or need more help. This will help you get an idea of what needs to be done to improve performance.

To monitor your staff’s daily performance, you need to provide them with a schedule to complete for the day. Ask them to provide feedback to their supervisors during the course of the day. This feedback will identify what changes need to be made to improve productivity.

Other Ways to Monitor Productivity

Communicate your expectations and key performance indicators (KPIs) for your team, and conduct regular performance management meetings throughout the year.

Most performance management checks take place once or twice a year. This won’t help your team grow and if they are struggling, their problems will only get worse.

By giving feedback often, you’ll be able to monitor their performance in real-time, and see if they make progress. It will also help you note any struggles that they are facing and provide aid to them.

Another tip would be to conduct annual employee engagement surveys to find out how they feel about changes and progress at work, and their ideas to make the team’s workflow better.

How to Improve Morale Among Your Team

Ensuring work is done properly is only one factor of improving the productivity of your team, but making sure that your team is well taken care of and made to feel like a valued member of staff.

• Growth opportunities: Opportunities for growth are usually well received by staff, they appreciate being given the chance to learn more about the industry they are in as well as new factors that can impact how to do their job. This will also open them to career and succession planning opportunities.
• Better communication: Implement tools that allow for better communication within your team. They will feel more secure if they can have conversations with their managers when they stumble into a problem. Also communicating with your team about non-work related things creates a sense of camaraderie and helps build trust.
• Recognition: Sharing the wins of your team makes them feel valued and it gives meaning to the work that they do. It’ll also create good-natured competition within your ranks and have them strive for recognition. You can also include rewards as part of your recognition initiatives.
• Learning and development: You can start by providing training courses for your team in order for them to be efficient in their roles in the company. Skills development helps your employees do their work better. Having your teams take on upskilling business courses - like the ones Acuity Training offers - will help them use the tools that will aid their efficiency levels.
• Flexible work options: Provide flexibility options for your team, like hybrid or remote working options, especially if their position allows for it. Some people are able to work better in different environments. First step to this is looking into familiarising your team with a remote setup so that the transition is smooth.
• Work-life balance: Encourage breaks to rest and recuperate. Staff having a good work-life balance is important for preventing burnout and office stress.
• Team Building: Work productivity will be increased by having team building sessions so that team members can learn to work together in unity and find their strengths.
• Health considerations: Stress can cause a lot of other health issues. Put into place health and wellness checks to provide assistance to your staff. Create an employee assistance program (EAP) which allows for them to get help for non-related work problems as well.
• DEIB: Have in place a diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging officer or policy in your HR plans. This helps make sure that employees are given opportunities at all levels of the company. It also promotes fairness and trust in the company.

Remote Management

Managing a remote team may seem like they’re harder because employees are not in your physical presence at all times. But this is further from the truth. Due to the advancements of the digital age, especially after the recent pandemic, there are now means to monitor staff that are not based in the office and make sure that peak productivity is still achieved.

Communication between leadership and the teams needs to be a more streamlined means of communication that can take place in real time. Email threads can end up confusing people more. To combat this there are chat tools like Slack and Bitrix24 that allow businesses to chat with their team members individually or in department-related group chats and are unaffected by outsiders.

There are also applications and software that allow HR teams to closely monitor staff productivity when you cannot be there to physically do so.

Conclusion

Improving productivity is ensuring that your employees have the necessary tools to do their work, but it also requires a closer eye on the work they do, so any issues can be ironed out in the early stages.

You also need to take into account factors that will improve employee morale which play a big factor in the work that they put out.

By implementing this advice, you will be able to manage the productivity of your team much better if they are based in an office or remotely.

Author Bio

Jodie Hurst is a financial analyst, turned entrepreneur, who advises businesses on using technology to manage teams, upskill staff, and streamline business processes.