Increasing employee productivity is no easy task. Team members often get confused when tasks get redistributed. Moreover, increasing the amount of time spent on a job can lower the overall level of job satisfaction across your service company. Contrary to popular belief, hard work does not always increase productivity.
To be a successful business owner, often great project management skills are not enough to locate productivity killers in your employees’ work. What else could you implement as a small business, in order to increase employee engagement in the workspace?
How To Increase Employee Productivity as a Service Company?
Employees in service-based business such as plumbers, electricians, delivery businesses, and others, are used to hard work in their work environment. Â For a business owner in this field, acquiring more clients would usually mean hiring new employees to keep up with the workload and prevent burnout.
Of course, there is a way of making your staff members work overtime but that would most often prove as a dangerous productivity killer and might even force someone to quit. Maintaining a good work-life balance is important for your staff members in order to prevent burnout.
1. Digitising your work orders can prevent unnecessary administrative work and free some time. Boosting the efficiency of all your operations can be done by monitoring certain metrics. In the past century, service workers had to travel to their central office and acquire work orders from there. A decade later, we started taking orders by phone calls.
2. Use technology to its full potential. Nowadays, you can control the actions of your team members and seek clients in social media at the same time through your smartphone. Â Nowadays, artificial intelligence, machine learning and cloud-based technology can be applied in any business. The functionalities of cloud systems allow you to stay connected with a system from any point in the world. Not having to travel unnecessary trips to the office saves time. Messaging employees can replace many calls that would otherwise cost both sides time that could be spent working.
You do not need to be the owner of a fancy startup to implement smart new technologies in your business. There are many job management systems that allow you to do real-time tracking of work hours, messaging and project management.
3. Improve communication. Many companies use programs such as slack or twist to keep track of messages and communicate in a faster way. Even more, groups can be added there and instead of communicating a message with 30 people separately, you could just write off one message to a certain group of team members.
Increase Productivity With a Modern Work Environment
Smart management systems allow for a business owner to lead employees through their phones, without even making calls.
4. Improve routing. You can manage productive employees in real-time by giving them daily instructions to where they are needed next. GPS Tracking can be implemented to improve the routes they take, as in all servicing businesses travelling from point A to point B can slow things down. Even if your workers know the town pretty well, Google Maps can give them the edge over traffic and allow them to reach a few minutes earlier. Google takes into account the data of all users that use it and can give you suggestions on the best route due to accidents and traffic jams.
5. Digital calendars are a key element in time management optimisation. Checking your calendar on a regular basis will ensure that no event or service is ever missed. Calendars allow your staff to avoid any mistakes of overlapping activities and to plan ahead. Collaboration tools are available in many work management systems, that allow for engaged employees to schedule meetings, work together or even redistribute work if they are permitted to do so.
GPS Tracking allows you to send the nearest available employee toward a site. If an emergency occurs in industries such as plumbing, and electric work your staff members would need to get there as soon as possible.
6. Optimise separate actions. Dispatching the nearest available team member not only cuts down your bottom line expenses due to lower fuel costs, and better time management but also boosts client satisfaction with the much faster response time.
Doing that in real-time gives you an edge over competitors both in terms of staff management, process optimisation and response time. Despite being a hundred small optimisation tips, these types of know-how processes can prove themselves very useful to a business owner to increase productivity of team members.
Increase Productivity of Team Members With Fleet Management Software
Most solutions allow for your already existing databases of work orders to be imported into the new system. At first, it might seem counterintuitive to switch to a completely new project management tool, however, the modern functionalities it comes along with will prove useful after the first day of work.
Such systems not only let you inform your staff members in a quicker, simpler way, they also allow them to communicate in a better way between themselves which greatly improves the work environment.
Higher Job Satisfaction Increases Employee Productivity
A study, conducted by the University of Warwick determined that staff members with higher job satisfaction had an increased level of productivity by an average of 12%. On the other hand, team members that were not satisfied had productivity that was 10 % lower than the average. Ensuring that everyone in the company is treated equally and that the bonds and communication between all individuals is on point is crucial to achieving higher levels of job satisfaction.
Moreover, activities such as team building and employee gatherings have proven themselves to boost the morale of the workforce in any field of work. The longer retention of your employees is just as if not more important than the retention of your customers.
RELATED POST
