Your employees are your most valuable asset. No company resource has as much power to improve profit margins as they do. When your employees are at their most productive, the company as a whole achieves optimal performance.
Not only does high employee productivity contribute to healthy profit margins but it also reduces costs. When employees are more productive, you don’t need to hire as many people to get the job done. You’ll also have fewer communication channels to navigate and fewer people to train when it comes to procedural changes.
There are many ways you can increase productivity by investing in your employees. At Tulip Media, we are constantly looking at ways to improve the productivity of our team by doing just that. Today, I’m going to share some of the secrets we’ve uncovered with you.
Establish an Efficient Office Setup
An efficient office setup includes speedy laptops, solid state drives (SSDs), and dual monitor systems. Most of us have experienced the struggle of losing our place amidst a sea of open tabs or coming face to face with the spinning wheel of death. That’s why all of these components are essential for the high standard of productivity we maintain at Tulip Media, and we recommend you employ them for your team too.
Laptop speed dictates how quickly your employees can complete the tasks assigned to them. When every single member of your team is working from a device with optimal speed, the entire organization will move faster as a result. You’ll also reduce the episodes of frustration associated with slow loading times. It’s a win-win all around.
Solid state drives, or SSDs, play a significant role in determining a laptop’s operating speed. One study found that upgrading to an SSD cut the start-up time for laptops in half. Think of how much time your team would save together each week if the loading time for their system was halved. SSDs are particularly effective for companies that handle a significant amount of data on the day-to-day because SSDs reduce processing times for saving large databases, rendering videos and photos, and performing complex customer management functions.
System speed isn’t the only component that dictates efficiency. Oftentimes, employees lose their focus when switching between tabs. It’s also becoming more frustrating to use a single screen for work as laptop screens continue to get smaller. Installing a dual monitor system resolves this issue. Instead of juggling tabs, we simply need to glance back and forth or quickly drag a window onto our second screen so we can view both tasks at once.
Avoid Underemployment
Having your specially trained, high-pay employees perform menial tasks such as going to the bank or picking up office supplies is a waste of their time and your money. At Tulip Media, we have a minimum wage employee come in for a few hours each week to perform these tasks so that the rest of our team can focus on what their specialty is and what brings in revenue dollars for our company. This is something we highly recommend all of our Client-Partners do to save valuable time for their teams as well.
Use a Team Management Application
A team management application helps productivity through workload sharing and the standardizing of operating procedures. At Tulip Media, we use a service called Teamwork.
Using Teamwork, we all have the ability to see each other’s workload. This makes it easy to see when work is unevenly distributed and to rearrange it in a more efficient way so that everyone is sharing evenly in the tasks at hand.
In 2020, we invested in standardizing our procedures through Teamwork. We realized that a huge bottleneck in our production process was team members not knowing how to perform certain tasks. We addressed this problem by creating instructional videos, documents, and pre-made sets of subtasks so that any one of us could turn to these aids for the completion of common assignments. This has saved time across the board because the more experienced employees don’t have to spend time training less experienced employees, and the employees being trained are doing so in the most consistent and efficient way possible.
Invest in Physical and Mental Health
Prior to the pandemic, 61 percent of employees in North America reported feeling burned out at their jobs. Thirty-one percent admitted to feeling high levels of stress while at work.
Both stress and exhaustion are incredibly counterproductive. Employees who are stressed or burned out are more likely to make mistakes. They’re also more likely to get sick because stress suppresses the immune system, which can lead to a bigger problem.
Even worse than taking an excessive number of sick days is when ill employees come into work. Not only are they unable to work effectively but they are now spreading their germs around to everyone else in the office.
Many companies, including Tulip Media, have caught on to this trend and invested in wellness programs to protect their team’s physical and mental health. Such programs have shown to boost productivity by up to 11 percent.
Capture the Results
More productive employees are able to accomplish more work in less time, and happy and healthy employees have the motivation to sustain a better work ethic over the long term.
Although new measures may cost more up front, the return on your investment will be substantial.
You can measure your team’s productivity as the amount of revenue generated per employee. This is calculated simply as total revenue divided by the number of full-time employees. Make this calculation prior to investing in the measures we’ve discussed and compare the results after new measures to improve speed, focus, employment optimization, organization, and health are put in place.
We’d love to know how this works for you! If you have any further suggestions, we’d love to hear about those too. Get in touch with us at TulipMediaGroup.com/contact to share your results.
