How To Get Employees To Work Harder Without Being A Slave Driver

Are your staff slacking? Ranting and raving at them is unlikely to be the solution. A lack of productivity can be for a variety of reasons. Here are just a few ways that you can restore a sense of drive to your employees.
Expand their skillset
Have your workers all been thoroughly trained up? Many employers don’t have the time to give sufficient training to staff, but this can result in an unskilled workforce. Making sure everyone is fully trained up will strengthen your workforce, allowing everyone to work as a team. You can also pay for employees to go on courses, which could improve their productivity even more by giving them new skills and shortcuts to use.
Give them the tools they need
Are your employees with the best tools and equipment you can give them? If you’re working with old computers or machinery that’s forever having faults, your workforce won’t be able to efficiently do the job at hand. Competitor businesses may have better tech, and you could be falling behind not because your employees are slacking but because they’re using outdated machinery. This is particularly common in digitally based businesses in which employers cling onto old tech to save costs.
Motivation is key
Are your staff motivated? A hundred and one things can affect employee motivation from low pay to a lack of prospects to a lack of camaraderie. This post, Employee Motivation Made Easy, points out some of the major areas where you may be able to spur on your workforce to have more love for their job.
Let employees play to their strengths
Are your employees in the right roles? A successful strategy for restoring productivity to a business can often be to reassess the roles that everyone has within the company. Assess everyone’s strengths and try to find work for them within the company that plays to these strengths. If someone is particularly good at making sales, put them in a position that enables to them to do this. If someone has creative talents, give them creative jobs such as marketing and research. If someone is very organisational, consider giving them organisational roles such as creating new filing systems and creating lists and itineraries. Similarly if employees have individual weaknesses, try to limit their involvement in activities that will involve exposing this.
Get rid of the bad eggs
Are individual employees bringing the whole company down? Whilst every employee should be held responsible over who they hire, we all make bad decisions, which can mean hiring the wrong person from time to time. Bad employees may cause conflict in the team, regularly take time off, shrug off responsibility or simply do the job badly, which could be affecting everyone’s output. You should provide these bad employees with warnings and if they don’t improve, it’s time to bite the bullet and let them go. When hiring new employees, you can also introduce a probation period with regular check-ups to see how they’re progressing. If an employee does not pass this, it also gives you reasonable reason to get rid of them.