In a market as fast moving as the technology sector, efficiency is king. Being able to streamline projects, building faster and working smarter doesn’t only give you a competitive edge against your competition, but also keeps your business moving and helps you keep hold of your best employees. If you’re looking for ways to increase productivity across your business, you can’t go far wrong with these tips!

Review your existing setup

When you look at increasing your business’ productivity, it’s important to know where you’re at in your process. It’s impossible to plan for the future without knowing where you want to be heading. By keeping the overall objective and vision of the business in mind, you have a variable from which to measure any successes and failures. A good idea is to draw a process map of your information flow to understand and visualize each point of the process.

Implement a continuous improvement approach

Increasing productivity in your business is an ongoing process. Rome wasn’t built in a day after all! Benchmarking is an important step in beginning this process. By assessing your competition and standards within your industry, you’re giving yourself a framework within which you can build more effective system. Approach the process step-by-step; tackling everything at once will cause confusion, distract you from priorities and keep you from your desired results!

Many hands make light work. Divide the process among specific teams who can prioritise specific aspects of your productivity redesign.

To be able to measure your results, you have to know which variables you are testing. If you’ve assessed your competition, industry standards and the infrastructure you will know what you are testing against, and what so have an idea of what success will look like to you.

Employees and flexibility

A happy employee is a good employee. This isn’t just a well-known phrase, it’s also been backed up by numerous studies. According to a University of Warwick study, happy employees are 12 percent more productive than their unhappy counterparts. One great investment to make in employees is offering a flexible working environment. Offering choice, freedom, flexitime, variable holiday – there are many ways of implementing a more flexible environment which have shown to increase enterprise productivity.

Workflow organization

It’s a difficult task to implement changes without knowing the structure of your organisation. By understanding and improving your process flow both within and between teams you help individuals communicate more effectively around long-term projects. Allowing teams to discuss work, projects and ideas you ease the flow of information and create a more forward-thinking environment.

More natural light

It’s not just important to take breaks throughout the day. The presence of natural light has been proven to reduce agitation and increase productivity compared to artificial light. Now don’t go and turn off all the lights; your office needs light to function. You can avoid a loss of productivity by arranging your office to maximise the available natural light. Set up desks near windows, avoid blocking light sources, consider using warmer hued bulbs; there are a lot of creative ways to increase productivity this way.

Practice positive feedback

Negativity breeds negativity. Encourage motivation and positivity amongst your employees across all stages of your organisation. It doesn’t hurt to let employees know they’re doing a good job and their work is appreciated, and any given criticism should be constructive. Personal incentives are a great way to encourage greater productivity; holiday incentives, vouchers and food are a great way to people’s hearts.

Employee development

One sure fire way to decrease productivity is to push your employees into the same routine every single day. Variety not only increases efficiency and productivity but also helps raise general well-being. Chances to break up the day through constructive activity such as learning, training, personal and professional development not only raise happiness and productivity, but also develop your workforce’s skillset and knowledge. If they feel you are investing in them, they will invest more in their work and the business.