It’s really hard to keep up with the times, especially in our modern era. Life has become a never-ending race. The prize? Material progress. To attain this “end,” people go to extreme lengths, even suffocating the “means” in the process. And what are the means of a modern day business? The workforce. More like the Overworked force.
Yes, employees are worked to the point that they lose their individuality and become mere cogs in a huge machine. As a result of this dehumanization, they’re prone to get demotivated, which means they are less inclined to work harder. An inefficient worker then negatively influences the overall performance of a business – an undesirable outcome, indeed.
So how can you make the modern worker relatively happy? What changes can you introduce in the system to ease and encourage employees? Read on below to find out.
Entertaining Respites
Anything which runs without pause ultimately suffers in the end. Take your smartphone, for example. If you use it continuously, checking your notifications here and playing your apps there, what will happen? The battery will die, right? You’ll have to rest it and recharge it in order to use it again. Similarly, if an employee works twenty hours straight each day, they will eventually fall down by the end of the week. Literally. They will lose health and motivation in large degrees – something you do NOT want, as it will put a major kink in your business’ day to day functioning.
So be wise, considerate, and fair to your employees. Give them much-deserved short breaks throughout the long day. Set up an entertainment room just for this purpose, with gaming modules, a large screen TV, internet facilities as acquired from Cox, foosball, etc. You’ll see how their productivity level spikes up!
Accountable Autonomy
Trust is a factor on which a lot of things are based. It is handed down from a master to a student, from a mother to a child, from one friend to another. It needs to be sustained for human relationships to work. This is especially true in the case of the employer-employee bond. Usually, bosses become highly overbearing and breathe down the neck of the workers, not giving them enough space to grow and mature. They scrutinize everything, and are quite unwilling to let the control out of their hands, or to delegate power to others.
This is unhealthy work behavior, as the lack of trust ultimately ushers in antipathy. So trust your employees. Let them know what’s expected of them, and give them enough autonomy to deal with the task as they think wise. This will boost their productivity to a great extent, and bring in an era of profits.
Flexible Work-Modes
If you’re bound to sit in one place for fourteen hours straight every single day, aren’t you going to get bored really, really fast? Of course you are! There’s a thing about boredom too: it leads to procrastination, which is highly counterproductive. Because of this, the quality of the work starts falling and dragging across the weakly floor, bringing losses instead of profits. You don’t want that, do you?
Then go ahead and change your game. Make work modes flexible. Allow employees to move around the office, to change their environment if they feel suffocated, to sit on a bench in a park if that’s how they’ll get inspired, and to even work from the comfort of their home, as long as they submit on time. Eased up workers are more productive than those who aren’t!
Measured Feedback
Imagine: you’re writing a book about some science-fiction phenomenon. Each day, you come up with a chapter and write it up. After finishing, you send it to your mentor, who goes through it, points out mistakes, suggests changes, and give tips for the next chapter. This way, your book becomes a bestseller. Why? Because of the constant feedback, without which you’d have felt like you’re writing away into the oblivion, with no one to guide you.
This is precisely what a modern employee needs: feedback from the employer, which then motivates the worker to be productive, to perform better than before, and to think outside the box.
Humane Incentives
This is the most important thing there is – the light at the end of the tunnel. The promise of betterment. The ultimate reward. Incentives boost productivity like nothing else. Work a little extra, and earn a little extra. Eat a large pizza at our restaurant, and get a small one for free. Ace the exam, and the PS4 is yours. These are all incentives.
You should make use of them in your workplace to make the employees more productive. Give out personalized thank you notes, lunch deals, paid off-days, lazy Tuesday chances, or whatever your particular employees might enjoy.
With the aforementioned tips, you can be sure that your business will progress by leaps and bounds, all because of decently motivated workers!
Read more: 5 Benefits of Tracking Employees’ Work Hours
