Get Smart! How To Stop Your Employees Working Into The Ground

It seems to be the buzz word for any company now, that we need to work harder more than anything else. And of course, it’s been communicated to us through the generations that working hard is the one thing that will pay off in the end. Now, from the perspective of a manager, do you want your employees to work so hard, every single day that by the time the end of the year rolls round, that they are so exhausted, that you have so many employees off sick? And your business takes a nosedive in the last crucial weeks of the year?! There are many concerns about the adverse effects of business downtime, in terms of how productivity is negatively affected, but here is a case for working smarter, not harder…

Measure The Results

We are obsessed with tracking time over anything else. After all, we seem to have the received wisdom in business that the quicker you do something, the more productive you are. However, doesn’t this mean that there are more errors? It’s very likely that it is. So, instead of doing everything as quick as possible, focus on getting the adequate results. This can be done in various ways, such as breaking a task down into manageable chunks, as this will help keep momentum, but also start to look at how you measure productivity. If you are doing it in such a manner that you are forcing people to pedal faster, this only works for so long, and you then get the illness, stress, and anxiety that comes with a lot of high-pressure work environments.

Get Knowledgeable Staff

Picking the right workers has a lot to do with making a business run effectively. And the crux of the working smarter mentality is to pick workers you have that ethos embedded in them. People that can work smarter will naturally find ways to complete a task effectively, with little exertion, and therefore exhaustion. In addition to this, those people are primed for additional education. These are the people that you can help to nurture to become line managers, and eventually, managers. These are the people who can get an overall appreciation of business processes, not just their own piece of the puzzle. It’s these people that you can train up, and it doesn’t even have to be an expensive process where you have to send them away for a year. There are courses like supply chain management masters that can be completed online. But with many online course now, there seems to be a mini subject dedicated to one aspect of any type of business, which means that your employees can get an all-around benefit. And the skills that they can learn, they are able to apply to their everyday working practices.

Manage The Work/life Balance

For those that are overworked, it’s all about managing the stress. And while there are courses in how to manage your stress effectively, the overall lesson you need to take away from this is that your staff need to have a well-balanced life, in and outside of work. If you find that you are overworking your staff, they don’t have sufficient downtime, and therefore they don’t recuperate effectively to be productive for your company. It’s as simple as that!

Working smarter is something that every business should implement now, but it seems to be an idea that many entrepreneurs are reticent of, but in implementing these three basic processes, you would see an incredible improvement in every part of the company.

This infographic is created by https://www.msllc.com/