In this blog post, we will see the top 5 ways to increase productivity in any kind of business. A successful business needs maximum productivity from its workforce to keep finding favorable results. The ultimate effectiveness of maximizing the output out of minimal efforts by considerably tweaking how fast and far you can go with it is the key to increasing productivity. An organization/admin/entity needs to have a simple and clear plan to maximize productivity. This plan will help them decide what operations need to be conducted to achieve a particular target.
Prioritizing a plan to boost productivity takes a lot of flexibility and time. You need to understand the key performance indicators that will increase the output and keep the team motivated and on top of their physical wellness game. These are some of the many factors that will make an organization more productive than it is presently.
How to increase productivity?
The question of what productivity is has been discussed already. Business productivity is highly correlated to how engaged the operation is in the entire process. A particular Harvard University study conducted by management researchers revealed that productivity is boosted if these operations are simple, effective, and not entirely managed by humans. If the operation is complex and depends more on human supervision and manual processes, it makes it less productive.
The manager, company leaders, and admins work to keep these human and mechanical elements working in tandem. It's essential to engage employees and hand them the best digital tools and software to manage a job efficiently and increase its pace. If you can do it sensibly, half of your job is done.
5 best ways to improve business productivity
Here are the top 5 tactics that will quickly help you in maximizing productivity without bringing a huge change in the way business is operating –
1- Keep every part of the process as simple as you can: Having a smart productivity strategy is very important. But it necessarily doesn't have to be very intricate and complicated. As a business owner or organizer or an admin or manager, you should create an extremely simple plan focused on only a few elements. The steps should be clear, and outcomes are generally successful or at least in favor of the organizations.
2- Setting reminders at appropriate junctures: Now here is where you can use some apps or software. There are certain apps like smart calendars or some reminder apps where you can first record what you need to do at a specific date and time. Then you get reminded at an appropriate time that you need to get the work done. You can also use some collaborative tools, integrate with these reminder apps, and never forget what you need to work on. You can even set milestones on it.
3- Regularly review your goals: Once you have set your goals, you need to constantly review them to know whether you have been achieving one milestone after another and getting the job done at the mentioned deadline. Reviewing is also one of the most important markers which will help you to gauge your productivity. However, make sure they are not elaborate and do not halt the operational flow at any point. Why is reviewing critical? It helps to constantly check whether there are any bottlenecks in the midst of the operational flow. Also, you need to keep your expectations realistic.
4- Minimize or eliminate any activities that waste time in any way: Most of these time-wasting activities are hidden. So, you need to spot them with vigilance, and then you need to work on eliminating them. Some of the activities that are considered a source of wastage of time in an organization are -
- Official emails – Make sure you use a mail management app that helps you go through it and quickly eliminate spam messages.
- Meetings – These need to be in limited numbers and should only be done when it is a must. Otherwise, ping the people involved and get back to work as quickly as possible. Don't indulge in any casual talk during office hours.
- Co-worker interaction – You should share a rapport with your colleagues, but don't interact too much over the coffee machine or while drinking for hours. Keep all this for after-office hours.
- Organize all the things around you – To boost productivity, you need to eliminate disorganization, and there are email management apps and reminder apps for that job. Apart from this, you can label all your folders and try to make your work as concise as possible. If you need to clean your desk and desktop, then so be it. However, certain cleaner apps remove all unnecessary files from your desktop. For your desk, you will have to do that yourself.
- Social media usage – That is a productivity killer. Until and unless you are not on the social media team, refrain from using social media as much as possible. If you are a manager or a business owner, then you need to have a social media usage policy in place that clearly states when employees can use social media.
- How to beat procrastination - All of us do it at some point. But the major question is how you avoid it. Experts say the best solution to avoid it is through clear deadlines and being accountable for it.
5- Use productivity software and tools: What are productivity tools? These are certain software apps that help you in increasing the efficiency of your operational workflow and help in ultimately increase productivity. Technology can be the best assistant for boosting productivity. If it is used properly, then these apps can help significantly boost business productivity.
Given below are some of the popular productivity apps that can help in improving workplace productivity.
1- Google Workspace: Google Workspace is a cloud platform. It’s a set of Google’s productivity apps like- Gmail, Docs, Meet, Sheets, and more. You can improve communications and collaboration, make video calls, share thoughts and topics with your teams with the help of Google Workspace. It offers users to work fast and smartly. Some basic features are-
- Organize your inbox with Gmail’s labels.
- Collaborate with team members on Google Doc.
- Schedule meetings on Google Meet.
Learn more from Google Workspace Learning Center.
2- Foresight: Foresight is a no-code Google Workspace Workflow Automation platform. It does workflow automation to improve business productivity for organizations. There are some loopholes in Google domain administration. Foresight aims to fix those issues.
IT administrative tasks are iterative and time-consuming. So, the admin needs to perform repeated actions several times. They have to create user accounts, add them to organizational units, send welcome messages to new employees, and so on. The Google Admin Console performs these actions manually. Thus it becomes time-consuming and makes errors. Here, Foresight sets an automation workflow that increases efficiency, and productivity, and saves time as well. The automation rule includes 2 elements – triggers and actions.
The other productivity tools are- Dropbox, Evernote, Slack, and Todoist, etc.
There are many other apps you can search online and boost your organization's productivity. Also, make sure you use the AI-enabled ones also, as they have some advanced functionality.
How Foresight helps in boosting productivity?
Any organization can boost its productivity by using Foresight. Are you curious about how it works? It integrates with your Google Workspace account and helps you automate the workflow without coding anything. It’s a SaaS platform to help businesses streamline and automate Google Workspace workflows without learning to code. It empowers administrators and users to design complex business workflows that cannot be done with native Google cloud services and work smarter. The Google Admin can do this task in Google Workspace with the help of foresight -
- It helps build automation rules without any coding. Hence you can do it without any coding experience.
- You can create different automation workflows with different products of Google Workspace. Ex. generates a Google Form, watch Google Drive changes, suspend users from Google Groups, etc.
- Get real-time alerts about the changes and status about your automated work.
Also, there are several business cases like –
- Automatically Assign New Users to Groups in Google Workspace
- Automatically Share Calendars to New Group Members in Google Workspace
- Automatically Suspend Inactive Users in Google Workspace
- Automate Google Workspace Offboarding Workflow
You can avail of the free 14-day trial version before buying this excellent online productivity software.