7 Deadly Sins for Employee productivity

As a business owner, if you’re witnessing a drop in sales performance along with falling revenues, the first question that might occur to you is: What more can we do? Or perhaps, how can we do things differently?

Your employees have access to all the right strategies and tools to get the job done. Yet, you find yourself battling to stay profitable. If brainstorming with your executive team doesn’t yield answers, you may want to take a closer look at your employee productivity levels. Perhaps the answer to falling margins lies in dwindling employee productivity on account of the following 7 deadly sins of employee productivity.

1.     Unscheduled, unstructured meetings

Though meetings are necessary to communicate policies and discuss ideas, they often interrupt the normal flow of work and affect productivity. This happens when meetings aren’t structured well and if the participants aren’t given sufficient prior notice to reschedule their daily tasks. Interruptions not only eat away into productivity, but they also cause employees to lose interest in their tasks.

2.     Multitasking

Do you have employees who can do multiple tasks simultaneously? While it may seem impressive, on closer observation you’ll find that they take more time to complete individual assignments, and the output may not be of the best quality. A study in the Journal of Experimental Psychology confirms these trends. What’s more, multi-tasking raises the probability of employees making costly mistakes.

3.     Micromanaging

Some managers constantly hover over their employees seeking accountability for every minute, thereby preventing them from focusing on their tasks. If you have to micromanage, try doing so by monitoring employees remotely and correcting them when necessary. CurrentWare’s BrowseReporter feature allows you to monitor employee’s computer without making them feel uncomfortable.

4.     Group projects

Businesses often try to engineer collaboration by encouraging employees to engage over things like pool, foosball and video games. Research studies indicate that over 80 percent office workers touch peak productivity while working alone. People tend to gravitate to each other naturally as and when they need to. Group activities only waste time and kill productivity.

5.     Not rewarding correctly

If your pay-for-performance program does not use concrete data to assess performance, your high-performing employees may end up getting the same bonuses as the mediocre-performing ones. Not only does this affect employee morale and productivity, it also erodes their perception of your company. Instead of watching your best performers leave, use an employee monitoring software to accurately and fairly assess employee performance.

6.     Employees not taking breaks

Do you encourage your employees to take regular breaks? Employees that are bound to their workstations for hours together are not only unproductive, but sooner or later they may suffer serious health-related problems.

7.     Electronic Distractions

Emails, social media websites and casual internet browsing are all major distractions that directly impact employee productivity. While some of these are unavoidable, the question to ask is: Are you using employee tracking software? Internet filtering and web blocking tools not only prevent employees from getting distracted, but they also thwart virus and malware attacks that could damage or steal your organization’s propriety data.