One of the greatest, lasting effects of the pandemic is the popularity of work-from-home arrangements. But we still have not worked out all of the bugs. Resolving low productivity as we stay remote or hybrid will be a challenge and requires a long-term, comprehensive, skills-based approach.
After all, personal productivity skills can range from things like the ability to focus to organizational skills to mindfulness. And who doesn’t have an area of weakness when it comes to being efficient? Within this question lies the true barrier to improving employee productivity: boosting the skills that enable employees to turn in a great performance, no matter what the environment is.
What Exactly Are Productivity Skills?
Productivity skills are the skills that enhance efficiency and performance at work. While these typically include soft skills, they can include hard skills as well. They can be skills that help an individual excel at his/her job but might also be talents that bring teams together to work more effectively for the greater goal. Examples of productivity skills include time management, organizational and planning skills, problem-solving, and decision-making abilities.
Challenges to Workplace Productivity
Poor work productivity is a serious issue for businesses. Distractions, unnecessary meetings, needless manual tasks, and double dipping (having two jobs at once) are all factors that damage the amount and quality of work. Interestingly, “productivity theater”, or the art of looking busy, is said to account for four hours of an eight-hour workday.
However, with various skill and technology advances, workplace productivity had been rising – until COVID-19. As of 2023 (the most recent statistics currently available), a US Bureau of Labor report showed that we still have not returned to pre-pandemic levels.
Another COVID inheritance is the ongoing hybrid and work-from-home policies, which are very popular with employees. To accommodate this desire, and to hopefully increase job satisfaction, many companies are making it a permanent feature of workplace settings. It is estimated that over 40% of employees work part-time (at least) from home.
Between the need for productivity and the preference for a hybrid environment lies the HR team. Their challenge is to find a way to make it work, even outside the normal places of work.
Productivity Skills that Boost Performance
COVID-19 disrupted an upward productivity trend that should be possible to get back on track. The challenge will be to get both managers and employees accustomed to a new way of working. That means a cultural change resulting in a workforce that is more independent, which in turn requires enhanced skills. While many productivity skills are worth honing, focusing on these ones in particular can greatly enhance professional performance:
1. Communication skills
Being able to communicate effectively affects everything at work, especially productivity. For example, precious time is often wasted on:
- Misunderstanding of tasks
- Misaligned expectations
- Trying to reach other team members
All of this translates into dollars down the toilet.
To improve communication, it’s important to first figure out which tool is best for your organization’s messages, whether that’s a team messaging platform, group chat app, Zoom sessions, or old-fashioned face-to-face. Then, you should upskill employees to maintain an open line of communication: have regular check-ins, set clear tasks and deadlines, and most importantly, ask for feedback. Getting and giving constructive criticism is a healthy part of enhancing productivity and performance.
2. Prioritization
Hand in hand with communication skills is the ability to prioritize, which also involves organizational and planning skills. Being able to look at one’s tasks and break them down into mini-tasks, with clear goals and milestones, is guaranteed to enhance productivity. This may require delegating tasks to other employees or teams, knowing when to rush, and when to push things off to a later time. Detailed plans and to-do lists, such as the Eisenhower matrix, can be very helpful in this regard.
3. Managing distractions
Part of managing distractions includes learning when and how to say no. And that applies to both other humans and devices. Turning off notifications, phones, tablets, music, and anything else that may interfere with one’s attention span can be the hardest productivity skill of all to master. Employees need to acknowledge and address their weak spots when it comes to their less-than-productive moments and identify solutions. That may mean working at a cafe instead of at home, or vice versa. It may also mean politely saying no when other employees ask for help with a lower-priority project. If you want to boost performance, keeping an eye on the ball means keeping an eye on the ball.
4. Doing one thing at a time
Tying all of these skills together is a piece of wise, age-old advice: Do one thing at a time. Multitasking has been proven again and again to be counterproductive. It takes the human brain time and energy to shift between tasks. Once you’ve prioritized tasks, do the difficult ones first, and don’t leave anything unfinished before you move on to the next task. Doing so can cause a ripple effect of delays that can hurt performance. Taking a bit more time to complete a task once you’re enmeshed in it will almost always be faster than returning to it at a later date and having to re-familiarize yourself. All of this is part and parcel of one’s time management skills, which is a cornerstone of productivity.
5. Knowing thyself
The last step, ultimately, in improving employee productivity is knowing one’s unique strengths and weaknesses. When you can identify where an employee is falling short in their performance, you can focus L&D efforts on those specific areas. Is the employee’s desk always a mess, and is that why they waste time locating important documents? Maybe an L&D expert can work with them on how to be better organized. Is an employee often late for their deadlines? Perhaps an expert in procrastination and prioritizing can teach them how to stay focused. The key to maximizing anyone’s performance lies in their unique needs–there is no one-size-fits-all magic solution. Understand who your employees are as individuals, and customize their professional development investments accordingly. That’s how you get results.
Upskilling, Competence, and Company Culture
One-on-one L&D upskilling programs are perhaps best suited for helping employees boost these skills. A ‘clean’ approach, which involves an L&D expert from outside the organization, can take a few months or even a year to complete. Experience, external point of view, and long-term engagements all allow the expert to understand how the productivity skills of their client stack up.
Over the course of the program, the expert works side-by-side with the employee, which enables several advantages:
- Close observation of behavior and customized recommendations
- Accountability of the participant with regular check-ins and offering motivation
- A long-term, comprehensive effort
Most importantly, a successful upskilling program can create significant gains for the organization. With one-third of Fortune 500 companies using external experts to enhance organizational and personal performance, this mode of learning seems to be a vital ingredient for the world’s most successful companies.
Beyond a strong connection to leading organizations, productivity upskilling can also boost company culture. The independence that employees gain by sharpening the skills listed above represents a move towards a mindset where workers understand that they are more of their own bosses. In essence, they enjoy the freedom of remote work but now need to step up by taking charge of their own tasks.
Organizations can empower employees by offering the pro-bono chance to improve their productivity, thereby helping employees to create a more productive company culture. Whether it’s in group lectures or workshops, or by offering employees their own expert for one-on-one, personalized programs, you can motivate your employees and get the best out of them by investing in their professional development.
Development Methods for Employee Productivity
By working with an expert over an extended period of time, employees can tackle different elements of their productivity challenges. The cyclical nature of the process provides incremental benefits, allowing the employee to improve a certain aspect of productivity during each cycle.
Importantly, an expert never decides on a course of action alone. Their job is to ask questions and provide observations that enable and empower the employee to do so. There are many L&D models used both to provide a framework for asking questions and a structure for the entire upskilling cycle.
For example, the FUEL model (Frame the engagement; Understand the current level of skills; Explore goals; Lay out a pathway) is a method for investigating an employee’s productivity levels and setting targets for improvement. Or, there is the OSCAR model (Outcome, Situation, Choices/Consequences, Actions, Review), around which an expert can design a course for defining, executing, reviewing, and reiterating upskilling.
The point is that different experts use different models and frameworks to get the best results from their participants. What matters is the end result – understanding the blockers and stoppers that prevent productivity in the workplace, whether remote or physical. By increasing productivity among employees, leadership can better trust that micromanagement isn’t necessary and that lack of oversight isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
That’s where upskilling comes in. It fixes the issues without making leadership and HR seem like the bad guys. Employees learn how to better tackle the tasks at hand while management and HR can take a step back and allow the company culture to become a more productive, less overreaching one.
Developing Employees’ Productivity Skills Benefits Businesses
As performance increases and culture changes, so do many of the factors that influence employee engagement, such as salary potential, commitment, and effort, all of which generate a range of organizational benefits that affect growth in different ways. According to a study by Gallup, employee engagement is significantly correlated with the following business enhancements:
Reduced Churn
A greater employee retention rate means lower replacement costs, the maintenance of skill levels, and the continuity of the working relationship with clients and employees.
Improved Customer Relationships
Treating customers properly is an absolute must for front-line employees, but satisfied workers in general might also, for example, pay more attention to manufacturing processes, resulting in fewer defects and increased client satisfaction.
Higher Profitability
Satisfied employees have a greater likelihood of healthier work attitudes throughout the value chain, which translates into efficiency, effort, and profit.
Improving Productivity Skills and Work/Life Balance
Improving productivity skills is also, of course, an advantage for the employee. When you’re more productive, you’re more able to maintain a healthy work/life balance and prevent burnout which is an occupational hazard.
Work/life balance became even more of a hot issue during the pandemic and the resulting move to remote jobs. In many ways, and for many people, remote work has erased the barriers between jobs and life at home. By building productivity skills, employees learn to deal with many of the factors that are part of work/life difficulties, such as:
Mindfulness
A mindful employee is aware of their current workload and makes good decisions about taking on additional tasks.
Focus
Developing the ability to concentrate allows workers to spend their time doing their jobs instead of falling prey to constant distractions.
Organization
From setting a reasonable schedule to knowing the network password, organization is the cornerstone of productivity.
The First Step Towards Productivity
Just as all employees are not equally productive, not all experts are equally effective. Locating the ideal skills training expert who focuses on productivity is a challenge, but there are tools that help you to find experts in this particular field, as well as many others.
With a global listing of top-rated experts, Growthspace’s precision skill development platform is already enabling employees at countless companies looking to enhance employee productivity. Contact us for a demo and discover how Growthspace is changing the way HR and L&D programming can truly boost learning and upskilling.
