If you feel that your business is constantly struggling to keep productivity levels high, there are plenty of things you can do to change that. Simply burying your head in the sand and hoping the problem fixes itself is probably not going to make a positive impact. Real action needs to be taken, but what does that actually look like?

Productivity strength is a good indicator of a business’s overall strength. Poor management and bad decision-making often lead to low productivity levels and poor morale in the workplace. That’s why it’s important to start at the top when it comes to considering the changes that you might want to make.

So if productivity is something that’s been a source of struggle for your company in recent times, read on and find out about some of the changes that you could implement to turn the situation around.

Aim to Reduce Distractions in the Workplace

First of all, you should try to make sure that there are not lots of distractions in the workplace that are holding your employees back and preventing them from doing their best work. That’s a risk that you never want to take, and it’s something that’s damaging to many businesses out there. It might be the case that there are other offices nearby that are creating a lot of noise or there are too many people coming in and out of the office creating distractions or that there are no quiet zones for focused work. These are all things to address.

Set Realistic Goals

Having realistic goals in place that you can work towards consistently will be very important indeed. You want to make sure that you have goals that your team members are going t be able to achieve and that is going to leave them feeling overwhelmed and demotivated. If you set unrealistic goals and your team is always falling short, it can do more harm than good, so that’s something to keep in mind. You want your team to enjoy the thrill that comes with hitting their targets, but that’ll only happen if the goals are realistic.

Provide Your Team with the Tools They Need

It’s up to you to make sure that your team has access to all of the tools that they need in order to do their jobs properly. Failing to do that will leave them flailing around for solutions that simply aren’t there. Maybe it’s been a long time since you upgraded the technology that your team relies on each day. Try to make sure that your technology is up to date and able to match the competition. If it’s not, it might be time to look at upgrading some of those systems.

Give Them Ownership of Their Work

Giving your employees a greater sense of ownership over their work is something that you should definitely think about doing if you haven’t already. When they get the sense that they’re able to prove themselves through their work, it helps a lot. And they can only really do that when they’re in charge and not constantly having changes forced upon them from above. If you want to release them and get the most from them, make them feel as if they completely own and have responsibility for the work they do.

Ensure Proper Communication

Good communication is essential to any business that’s trying to make positive changes. If people are not communicating effectively and getting vital messages across to one another, that’s ultimately going to result in bad outcomes for all involved. Real communication needs to start at the top and feed through the entire structure of the company. And make sure the right tools and technologies are in place to encourage consistent and quick responses between employees and departments. It might sound like a basic factor to get right, but it’ll have a significant impact on the overall productivity levels of your team.

Delegate Better

The way in which you delegate tasks to your team members will have a big impact on how easy you find it to succeed with your work. You want to make sure that you delegate in a way that allows you to get the most out of each and every member of your team. If that’s something that’s not currently happening, it suggests there’s a problem somewhere along the line. Understand what each member of your team is able to bring to the table and then make sure you give them the work that plays to their strengths most of all.

Try Some Team Building Exercises

Team building exercises and activities can be very helpful indeed when you’re trying to glue your team closer together. You want to make sure that your team is performing to the best of its ability and that each member of the team is trusting of the others. If you feel that this is something that’s lacking within your team right now, it might be time to give team-building activities a try. You can get external support for creating these team-building activities if you don’t know how to do it yourself.

Make Use of Project Management Tools

Project management tools are great for making sure you’re able to stay on track with your work and that your team is able to meet all of the objectives that come with a particular project. It’s hard to keep things organized sometimes when you have a lot of people working together on a single project. But with the help of the right project management tools, you’re able to make sure that the project stays on track and that everyone is able to complete the work that’s expected of them on time. It helps to centralize the work you’re doing.

Create a Happy and Supportive Work Environment

You want the work environment inside your business to be as happy and supportive as it can be. Because when your employees feel as if they’re working in that kind of environment, they’ll find it a lot easier to do their best work and to feel as if their needs are being met too. You want everyone to be supporting one another and you want a sense of camaraderie to exist in the office too. Without that, it’s very easy for the workplace to start to feel very disjointed and that’s not good for anybody.

Ensure Their Hard Work is Recognized

If people are not recognized for the hard work they do, they’re more likely to become demotivated and less likely to put in the effort you expect from them. That’s why something like employee recognition software can be so useful. It helps to ensure that your employees are recognized and rewarded for the hard work they put in and for the positive progress they make. It reinforces the kind of effort and productivity you want from your team, and that’s obviously an important part of improving productivity levels as a whole.

Give Them Space and Freedom to Work

It’s important that everyone in your workplace has a sense of freedom and space. You don’t want them to feel as if their every move is being watched and scrutinized by management because that’s simply not a healthy way for people to work. So give them the space and freedom they need in order to do their best work each day. Having a controlling approach to managing your team might make sense from your point of view, but it’s probably not what they want and it won’t be what helps them to do their best work.

Discourage Excessive Multitasking

Multitasking is something that happens in many workplaces, and there’s a myth that says it helps people to get work done faster and more efficiently, but that’s not been debunked. People who multitask are more likely to get tired and burnt out, and most research now shows that it’s much better for people to complete tasks one by one and get each piece of work done properly than to try to juggle lots of tasks at once. So try to pass that message on to your staff.

Provide Constructive Feedback

Finally, you should make sure that you’re providing constructive feedback to your staff members at every opportunity you get. You want to make sure that your team is able to press forward and progress and they can only do that in a way that suits the business if they actually know what they’re doing right and what they maybe need to do a little better at. Your feedback can focus their mind and help them to improve the aspects of their work that matter most, as long as it’s delivered in a constructive manner.

It’s important for your business that you’re able to keep your team’s productivity levels as high as they can be. An unproductive workforce is ultimately going to hold the business back and prevent it from getting to where it deserves to be. And that’s not what you want, so make the most of the ideas above.