Increasing Productivity in the Workplace

Highly engaged employees were found to be 26 percent more productive than their disengaged peers.  How does this affect the bottom line for companies? One study found an increase in total returns of 13 percent.  Increasingly employees are looking for value and meaningful recognition that has no price tag.

So what exactly is motivating employee productivity?  Recognition, Opportunity and Relationships.

Recognition: Positive feedback is instant recognition you can give to an employee that will give them a sense of pride.  How does this help productivity? Your employee knows that you appreciate their efforts.  According to the USNews.com article, How to Give Positive Feedback at Work, identify how your employee’s efforts made a positive impact on the team and the organization.  One study suggests that recognizing employee’s strengths encourages their team to thrive.

Opportunity: Giving employees the opportunity to use the skills they have helps them develop and take their skills to the next level.  Encouraging a lifelong learning culture can take your company a long way.  According to the smallbusiness.chron.com article, Effects of Training on Employee Performance, training enhances morale on the job and can even increase employee loyalty—two important motivators of productivity.

Relationships: Leadership is not always easy.  Engaging employees can be a challenge.  The key is finding ways to inspire your employees.  Communication has been and always will be a major component of all relationships from top level management to individual team members.  Open, honest communication must be a priority in business.  Once you have your communication down, how do you get your team to adopt your goals?  According to the study, Management Leadership and Productivity Improvement Programs, management needs to focus on goals that matter.  Management support for Education and Training, Empowerment, and Reward Systems can be used to motivate employees and employees who feel that their leadership cares are more productive.

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Employee Engagement & Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

Employee engagement is a workplace mantra.  Managers around the globe are starting to think about how to create a culture where employees thrive and become committed members of the team.  When a company is able to inspire its employees to adopt its goals through engagement, the company will see the benefits in productivity.  One way of doing this is to start with understanding how we as humans are inspired in the first place.  What do we need to become committed and how do employers meet that need?  If you could ask noted psychologist, Abraham Maslow, he might tell you meet their hierarchy of needs.

Who is Maslow and what is his Hierarchy of Needs?

Abraham Maslow proposed in a paper he wrote, “A Theory of Human Motivation” published in Psychological Review in 1943, that people’s motivations are unrelated to rewards or unconscious desires.  He theorized that people are motivated by what has become known as Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.  The hierarchy is depicted in a pyramid that contains five levels.  These levels include: Physiological Needs, Safety Needs, Social Needs, Esteem Needs, and Self-Actualization.

According to SimplyPsychology.com, people are motivated to achieve each of the needs in the pyramid.  After people fulfill the needs at one level they move on to the next.  To progress up the pyramid each lower need must be met.  Any time there is a failure to meet the needs at a lower level it disrupts the person’s ability to progress.  Life is unpredictable.  As situations arise these experiences can cause an individual to move back and forth between levels.

According to Maslow, only one in one hundred people ever become fully self-actualized. This is mainly due to our society which primarily rewards motivation based on esteem, love and other social needs.

How Does Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs Help Us Understand Employee Engagement?

To understand how Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs relates, we need to see the bigger picture.  Let’s start with Gallup’s “State of the American Workplace”. According to the report published last year, only 30 percent of employees are engaged.  Another 52 percent are disengaged and 18 percent are actively disengaged. What exactly does that mean?  It means that 70 percent of the American workforce is not committed to their organization’s goals and values.  They are not motivated to contribute to the organization’s success.  These workers are emotionally disconnected and less productive.

According to an article in Forbes, “Surprising, Disturbing Facts from the Mother of All Employee Engagement Surveys”, the leading factor that influences employee engagement is the relationship the employee has with their managers.  Choosing the right leaders significantly impacts the workforce.

“Outstanding leaders go out of their way to boost the self-esteem of their personnel. If people believe in themselves, it’s amazing what they can accomplish.” —Sam Walton

According to a study by Delloitte.com, “Global Human Capital Trends 2014—engaging the 21^st Century Workforce”, 65 percent of executives rated “overwhelmed employees” as an urgent need that must be addressed.  The “always on” employee was built by mobile technology.  We are always connected 24/7.  The new “workaholic” lifestyle just increases with seniority and income.

In addition to employees being overwhelmed, some other reasons for disengaged employees are: workload is too high, companies that do not invest in talent development, no advancement opportunities for high performers, non-inclusive culture, transitions in leadership.

“People leave managers, not organizations.” —Anonymous

The key to engaging employees, motivating your team, and increasing productivity in the long run is to invest in your workers.  Re-design the position, add benefits that matter, change the work environment and develop your team and leadership.  It is not always easy to re-engage a disengaged employee, but people aren’t motivated by the bottom line.  They are motivated by the things that meet their hierarchy of needs.

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Multitasking: You’re not as Productive as You Think

Mobile technology enables us to be hyper-connected to the ever expanding network of social and business worldwide.  It enables us to multitask like never before.  According to a study on technology and human potential, the negative effects of this “always on” mentality is an increased loss of patience and the need for instant gratification.

As technology advances it creates avenues for getting things done.  Working on multiple projects, doing multiple tasks all at the same time—but what are the results?  In our new inpatient world, we may be watching television, while checking emails; and at the same time: surfing the net, texting with friends, scheduling appointments, and even throwing in a game of Candy Crush—after all there may be a few seconds of lag time between texts, commercials, and webpage loading.  

The question is: How much attention are we giving to each of the projects or tasks we are doing? Are we really being that productive?

“When we talk about multitasking, we are really talking about attention.” --Christine Rosen, The Myth of Multitasking

One study estimates that multitasking costs global businesses 450 Billion each year.  The research shows that people who engage in multitasking actually end up wasting 40 percent of their productive time switching between tasks.  They also have a higher susceptibility to distractions.  Why is this? 

According to a study on distracted drivers, multitasking is a myth.  In this study it was revealed that the brain does not perform two or more tasks at once—what we like to believe it can do when we multitask.  Instead the brain actually performs these multiple tasks very quickly in a sequential order.  This “attention switching” gives us the false feeling of doing more in less time.  

While the brain attempts to juggle the tasks it is given, it must also juggle the focus and attention to each task, this results in a reaction time or delay.  These delays may be a few tenths of a second or more.  That may not seem like a lot, but they do add up. 

When we multitask we are also prone to making mistakes, which then we need time to fix.  Multitasking ends up making us ineffectual.

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