Are your employees working to their capacity?

One of the biggest challenges and responsibilities of managers is ensuring that their employees are happy, productive, and highly efficient in their work. You may have hired the most proficient candidates during the recruitment process, however, it’s important to ensure they continue performing effectively.

Of course trust is important as is giving them enough autonomy in terms of decision-making, working remotely, managing their time etc. You also want to make sure they make the most of their time at work and maintain productivity levels throughout the full working week.

Here are some of the ways you can find out if your employees are working to their capacity:

Track performance

A basic way to check employee productivity is to track their monthly performance. Including monitoring short-term and long-term goals, consistent work production. If daily targets and objectives are on track. Use software tools and productivity technology to manage projects. This is essential when working remotely and with larger teams.

Constant communication

Many managers and supervisors tend to overlook this factor, but communicating with employees is one of the easiest and quickest ways to find out about their performance and progress. Schedule a weekly zoom meeting or call, grab that coffee at the same time each week, this provides the opportunity and comfortable setting to update on progress. Report and approachability are very important.

Several communication tools such as Slack or Microsoft Teams help you reach out to your employees and keep in touch. They also help keep all employees in the loop so that everyone knows how well the projects are progressing.

Check in meetings

Less popular, but a highly effective method of knowing what your employees are up to. Schedule weekly check-in meetings with your whole team. Gather all your employees and discuss their current projects and progress, issues or barriers. Keep these meetings quick and to the point. Let everyone have their say. If there are deeper issues to tackle, set aside time to discuss those later.

This also gives the employees a chance to interact with each other, clear work-related confusions, and ask questions. In a COVID-19 environment you can still do this via zoom or teams and at the end of the meeting have a quick trivial pursuit game on a different topic each week to end off on a fun note.

Collaboration Tools

Use technology to your advantage, especially if you have employees working in remote work settings. There are many collaboration tools and monitoring software programs like Trello and Asana, Monday.com that are now the norm in assisting employees to track their time and progress. This also gives managers an excellent overview without having to micro manager and remind staff.

Additionally, some of these tools give employers minute-by-minute updates on how well workers are doing in their respective projects.

Collaborative Spirit

It is important for managers to keep a check on their employees’ performance and productivity levels. Track it in a collaborative spirit and have 100% trust which very important. Unless you have a reason or past issue with that employee which should be promptly resolved. So you can move forward rather than letting that distrust grow.

Employees can sense when management doesn’t trust them and they don’t work to their full potential.

Great companies that people want to work for foster and actively develop a culture of openness, teamwork and common goal. It’s not just about getting tasks done, but also about motivation and driving overall job satisfaction at work.

Most employees want to do the best job they possibly can and most work longer hours than they are paid for. There is a difference between productivity and poor management of tasks. Review both regularly. This could also be a great time to brush up on some skills and do some short productivity course with an online platform like Lynda

Help is on hand.

Be a great employer and your employees will want to follow suit and strive to fit in with the company culture. Talk to us if you want some extra resources and tools to ensure that you are getting the best you can from your staff. 

Check out our current FREE Employee Performance Process Document

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