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Stuart Gentle Publisher at Onrec

5 Ways HR Can Improve Productivity in the Workplace

As a human resources professional, you know the value of employees, and you also know that finding ways to make it easier for them to do their jobs is important.

Increasing productivity is good for the company and good for the worker, offering them more job satisfaction because they are not wasting their time on irrelevant or inefficient tasks. Below are several ways you might be able to improve productivity in your organization.

Prioritize Development

Even if you follow all the recruitment tips and strategies you find, it means nothing if you don’t prioritize further developing those that you hire. Prioritizing development for your employees helps with employee retention since it gives them the opportunity to keep learning new skills and advance. In contrast, a workplace that does not focus on this kind of development might find itself with a high rate of employee turnover. Having to constantly hire and train staff is an inefficient way to operate. Your organization becomes stronger from within when you support staff in career growth.

Get Tools for Efficiency

Make sure that workers have the tools they need to do their job. If your organization operates a fleet, electronic driver logs for trucks can help reduce the amount of paperwork they have to do. Electronic logging devices can automate certain processes. You can learn more about their cost, how they work and other information to decide if this is right for your organization. Other departments may benefit from a review of their current tools and technology to see if they are still meeting workers' needs or if they should be replaced.

Create Comfortable Surroundings

By their very nature, some jobs happen in uncomfortable surroundings. Employees may work outside in all kinds of weather, or tasks may be performed in an environment that is particularly noisy. However, within the parameters of the job, taking steps to make it as comfortable as possible can help with productivity. In an office setting, this might mean good lighting and ergonomic desk setups. In other environments, it could mean making sure that workers can take regular breaks or can be made more comfortable in other ways.

Offer Flexibility

Just as not every job can offer comfortable work conditions, it is not possible for every job to be flexible, but the ones that can be, should be. Many people work better at certain times of day or would perform better if they could build their schedule around parenting or other caregiving duties. Flexibility also makes employees feel as though their employer values and trusts them, and this can drive greater productivity overall.

Improve Engagement

An engaged employee is a happy employee, and happy employees are more productive. Communication is an excellent way to improve engagement, and this should go both ways as should feedback. Workers should feel they can speak up about various issues in the workplace or disagree with management even if in the end, they still need to defer to supervisors. Employee surveys can be an excellent tool to measure and improve engagement, and there is HR software that make it easy to do these types of surveys regularly so that you can course correct frequently as needed.