Tips to boost your employee productivity and engagement

In the hot job market of the past few years, many small-to-medium businesses hired high performers, in some cases paying top dollar for talent. But what happens when your people aren’t as productive or as engaged as you’d like?

In this two-part blog series, we distil ideas and inspiration for SME owners and managers to boost productivity and keep employees happy and engaged.

Part one focuses on ways of getting your staff more engaged, the importance of showing your employees how their work contributes to the purpose of the business, and how it may be that you, the business leader, might need coaching to help your staff raise their productivity.

How to boost worker engagement

While there are many productivity-boosting practices SMEs can adopt, it’s good to take a step back and try to get a clear picture of what might be hindering productivity in your workforce.

In some cases, people’s skills may not match their role. Unhealthy workplace culture, poor work-life balance, a lack of financial reward, learning and development, or recognition, bottlenecks, and a lack of career progression can all impact the amount of effort and motivation people have for their work.

To better engage your workers, try these tips:

• Foster a supportive and inclusive work environment so employees feel valued, respected, and empowered.
• Encourage open communication, and provide clear expectations and goals.
• Create opportunities for employees to share their ideas, concerns, and suggestions.
• Give employees some autonomy in their roles and empower them to take ownership of their work.
• Set realistic workloads and expectations and also promote boundaries and uninterrupted time to recharge, e.g. by discouraging after-hours communications.
• Monitor overtime and provide additional temporary or contract support if it becomes prolonged.
• Look at your people managers. Do they engage and inspire their team?

Continuous learning also empowers employees to grow and contribute their best. Things like online training, workshops, coaching, mentoring, and peer-to-peer learning are good ideas.

Other effective strategies for addressing employees’ learning needs are cross-functional projects, leadership development programmes, regular feedback, performance reviews, and development plans.

Recognition of good work - whether that’s financial or non-financial - can be very powerful in fostering a sense of pride and motivating staff to perform at a high level. An acknowledgement in a team meeting or a newsletter, personal thank-you notes, formal certificates, or social activity to celebrate success can all make a difference.

Show people how their work contributes to overall success

It’s important to give team members a sense of purpose and to explain what their purpose is.

Former US President John F Kennedy once asked a janitor at NASA what their job was. Instead of saying he was a janitor, the man said proudly: “I’m helping to put a man on the moon.”

If a staff member doesn’t understand the connection to what they’re doing and what the company is hoping to achieve, it can be hard for them to stay engaged and motivated.

You need to ensure that everyone is working toward the same vision and that there’s a clear line of sight of that vision in what people are doing every day. Connect people’s personal development plans (or individual performance plans) to this idea of having a collective focus.

Of course, no one wants to feel that they’re being unproductive and not achieving. For business owners, it’s about having courageous conversations with these workers. It’s about being curious, and asking why. It might take several conversations, perhaps informally or off-site, to find out what’s happening and to discover what’s contributing to below average productivity. It could be that something is happening outside work, or it might be that the employee has great ideas but they don’t feel comfortable expressing them.

Also, think about the example you are setting. A big portion of learning is done via observation. If you’re asking staff to do x, y, and z and wondering why they’re not doing x, y and z, what in practice are you doing?

Small business owners often work astronomical hours, long days and weekends, and while you might not explicitly expect staff to do that, your workers could well feel a sense of pressure to put in the same hours. Not everyone will respond well to that way of working.

You may need coaching skills

It may be that as a leader, you need to get some coaching in managing and incentivising people to boost productivity.

A good coach can teach you the value of curiosity, active listening, powerful questioning, and motivational interviewing. They’ll also teach the “coaches mindset” - the belief that everyone is doing their best with the resources they have available to them.

And it’ll teach you “coaching presence”, which is learning to be there 100%, no distractions, for the person you’re working with.

Through coaching, a business owner or manager can become more open to alternative views and beliefs. Because whether we’re aware of it or not, we can get stuck with our own beliefs and not realise there are alternative approaches.

Use your advisory board if you have one

If you have an advisory board or you’re thinking of assembling one, they can be very supportive to business owners wanting to raise employee performance.

Advisory boards can help in a number of practical ways:

• Providing diverse experience - as a business owner, you may not know enough about an employee's role to help them lift their game, but your board members may know more about the role and can support you to support your people.
• Focusing on productivity and performance issues - the board will want the business to succeed and can help you hone in on motivating your employees to do the same, delivering better results to meet expectations.
• Getting the right support in place for a new team member to be productive. Often employers will bring a person in, give them a job, and not create an environment around them to support them.
• Putting effective processes in place, e.g. giving employees a thorough onboarding experience, doing proper performance reviews on a regular basis, and communicating with them effectively.
• Setting realistic expectations. Business owners can have unrealistic expectations of what their staff can deliver and how quickly they can make a big difference.

In part two of this series, we look at how your team dynamics might be affecting employee productivity. We also discuss rewarding workers in the right way, and explore how development pathways can help engage and incentivise staff.

Read the article on turning underperforming employees around.