Ten Steps To Improve Your Office Productivity
In today's downsized offices, improved efficiency is a necessity. Here are ten fun and easy ways to increase your office productivity.
1) Cut down on socializing by encouraging employees to keep each other up to date via e-mail and tell them to include the entire team when appropriate. Timely, informative e-mails can improve communication and reduce the number of meetings. This gives people more time to focus on the project while keeping them informed as to what other team members are doing.
2) Hold lunch meetings. Provide cold cuts, condiments, bread and drinks and have a relaxed lunchtime meeting. This is an efficient way to get more work done without adding extra hours to the project schedule.
3) Have two scheduled exercise breaks (morning and afternoon) where employees get up and do some light exercise. Exercise breaks are a good way to re-energize employees and revitalize the workplace. Find a volunteer to lead people in some light stretches and encourage all employees to participate.
4) Have a morning breakfast club with juice, coffee and some light breakfast snacks. This will encourage employees to be on time and let them get their socializing done before work.
5) Create how-to guides. Have an online reference area with instructions for filling out forms or generating reports that require a specific format. These guides will be helpful for new employees as well as for anyone who may not generate specific paperwork on a regular basis.
6) Make sure that your e-mail program's spam filters are effective. Sorting through spam and junk e-mails can be an enormous time drain, and there's always the chance that an employee will miss an important e-mail.
7) Find out what your employees see as their biggest obstacle to efficiency and work with them to remedy the situation. Brainstorm the topic. Find out what frustrates people regularly and what they think will fix the problem. Each office has a number of unique things that could be done better. Often the employees gripe about it to each other. Schedule meeting time where these problems can be discussed and solutions recommended. Make sure that good solutions get implemented and give credit to the employees who suggested the fix.
8) Schedule monthly or bi-monthly clean-your-office time. Set aside an hour each month where everyone straightens up both their desk and their computer work area and purges anything out-of-date. This will help people stay organized and keep them from loosing track of small, but important, tasks that might otherwise fall by the wayside.
9) Have blanks of all forms and other paperwork available online so they can be filled out and filed electronically. If a hard copy is necessary, the form should be filled out online, then printed and filed. In addition, the system should be set up so the employee can save an electronic copy of the filled-in form.
10) Finally, don't forget to make sure your employees have access to the resources they need, listen to them when they tell you what the road blocks are, work with them to resolve the issues and praise them when they do a good job.
