Best Practices to Increase Company Productivity

Productivity is a key metric that will define your company’s success. When employees are unproductive, they’ll exhaust more time and energy while producing less work. By making a few changes to your company’s workplace and operations, however, you can make your company more productive.

Create a Distraction-Free Workplace

Whether your company operates in an office, warehouse, factory, retail store or elsewhere, you should eliminate all distractions from the environment. A study cited by The Telegraph found that three out of every 10 workers are distracted for three hours each day. If your company has 50 workers, that’s 45 hours of lost productivity each day.

To maximize your company’s productivity, remove common distractions from your workplace, including loud music, social media, texting, gossip and smoke breaks. By eliminating distractions such as these, workers can give their undivided attention to their respective job.

Cut Back on Meetings

How much time do your workers spend in meetings in a typical month? According to the Australian software development company Atlassian, roughly half of all meetings are considered a waste of time. You can still host meetings in your company, but you should keep them short and focused on a central topic.

Also read: Walk and Talk Your Way to Success: The Why’s and How’s of Walking Meetings

Some studies show that 30 minutes is the ideal length for corporate meetings. After the half-hour mark, attendee engagement level begins to drop, resulting in wasted time and lower productivity. So, plan your meetings in advance and keep them under 30 minutes to foster a more productive working environment.

Design Workplace With the Right Colors

The colors used in your workplace’s design will affect worker productivity levels. Reports show that blue and red are the best colors for promoting increased productivity. When workers are exposed to these colors, they generally work harder and more efficiently.

You can take advantage of this by designing your company’s workplace with red or blue. Painting the walls of your office blue, for instance, instills creativity and productivity. You can even use red and blue together for a greater effect. On the other hand, black has the opposite effect by promoting lower productivity levels, so it’s best to omit this color from your workplace’s design.

Allow Telecommuting

Another idea to increase your company’s productivity is to allow telecommuting. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), employees are more productive, satisfied and engaged when they work from home. With telecommuting, employees use a virtual workspace to perform their work.

Also read: Try These 9 Tools For Engaging and Managing Remote Employees

This digital environment creates a central hub where all telecommuting workers can log in and work. For information technology (IT) and other computer-related tasks, telecommuting is a great way to increase productivity.

Create a Comfortable Climate

Studies show that workers are most productive in a climate-controlled environment of 70 degrees to 77 degrees. If the climate in your workplace falls outside this range, you should consider adjusting it. Forcing workers to endure hot or cold temperatures for eight hours a day can hurt their productivity levels.

Use Productivity Software

If you aren’t using productivity software in your company’s operations, you are missing out on one of the most effective ways to boost productivity. Productivity software like Google Drive, for instance, allows workers to communicate and collaborate on projects over the internet. Because it’s a cloud service, workers can access Google Drive from any computer or device that’s connected to the internet. Of course, there are dozens of other productivity programs, some of which include Trello, Dropbox, OneDrive and Basecamp.

Following these best practices will help you create a more productive company. And as your company’s productivity increases, so will its profits.

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