Staff Productivity – 8 Effective Ways To Improve It | Unleashed

00:00 How to improve staff productivity
00:26 Tackle dust, noise & hazards
00:50 Automate your processes
01:50 Use quality gear & quality components
02:22 Avoid stock outs
02:42 Avoid overtime
03:26 Consider contract manufacturing
04:12 Don’t forget your contractors
04:48 Lift productivity by lifting morale

Labour costs are rising all over the world, which means it's more important than ever to get maximum value out of your staff. Now, that doesn’t mean just making people work faster – it means you want to be paying your staff for work that adds value - and avoiding tasks that don’t

1. Tackle dust, noise & hazards
We’ll start with a simple one, which is to remove environmental noise and hazards wherever you can. A noisy, unpleasant environment saps morale – it can lead to high turnover, which definitely kills productivity. It also contributes to mistakes that take time to fix & slows down your rate of work.

2. Automate your processes
Again, if you are paying staff you want pay them for value-adding work, not meaningless admin. So get ruthless about spotting and eliminating low value admin.

3. Use quality gear & quality components
We all need to balance quality against cost in business. But when you do so, make sure you weigh any short term savings against long term risks to productivity.
For your office workers that means laptops and a data plan that let them work quickly online!
And for manual workers, make sure low quality components aren’t slowing them down.

4. Avoid stock outs
This one’s particularly important for manufacturers: because nothing kills your staff productivity like paying people to wait for parts to arrive.
The simplest way to avoid that is by investing in a quality inventory management system that prompts you with low stock alerts – you can learn more about these below.

5. Avoid overtime
Easier said than done sometimes, but point number five is about avoiding overtime. Obviously paying for the occasional overtime shift at time and a half works out cheaper than hiring more fulltime staff if they’d be underutilised. Just make sure you take a long view of your overtime costs. Add up what you spend on overtime each year, and think about how you can use that spend to offset the issue.
You might find that production planning software will help you squeeze more time into your 9-5 hours. Or you could invest in a rostering tool. I jumped on Get App just now and found 72 different rostering apps that track overtime, so you definitely have options.

6. Consider contract manufacturing
On the flip side, if you have an underutilised workforce, you might be able to pad your schedule with external work. The classic model here is contract brewing. Basically craft brewers need a minimum level of investment in equipment and staff to get going, but until they’ve grown their brand they’ll often have low production levels compared with their costs. And that equals low staff productivity The fix here comes from taking on brewing jobs for other businesses who lack staff and gear, which can dramatically lift a brewer's productivity.
Now that approach won’t suit every business or industry, but for some it’s a smart option even just for a few years until you grow

7. Don’t forget your contractors
You might not think the productivity of contractors is your issue – but that’s wrong. That same productivity principle applies here – don’t pay your contractors for work that doesn’t add value.
A common example is your accountant. If they spend tedious hours reconciling purchase orders with your accounts, that's just a waste of money and time. Instead you can easily integrate your purchasing and accounting software so that reconciliation process is automated and happens in real time.

8. Lift productivity by lifting morale
Finally, the silent killer of staff productivity is low morale. Many of the points I’ve mentioned – like noisy workplaces poor quality tools or excess overtime can also lead to low morale. And staff that have low morale tend not to go that extra mile. They also leave – and anyone who’s been caught in a constant hiring and training cycle knows what a drag that is on productivity. If you have any number of staff and you don’t have a peole and culture manager, you probably need one. They’ll ensure you hire the right people, and retain the staff you have.

So there you have it – 8 not so obvious, but very powerful ways you can lift your staff productivity. I hope you’ve found them useful. If you’d like to get in touch about any of the solutions mentioned here, or learn about Unleashed, all of our details are below.
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For more about productivity, especially for manufacturers, see: https://www.unleashedsoftware.com/man...
For more about inventory management, check out http://www.unleashedsoftware.com