Enhancing Employee Productivity
To say that people are the key organization resources cannot be an understatement. Organizations need to put in place strategies and activities which will help to enhance employee productivity. Employees face numerous challenges and pressures in their effort to achieve more. In this article, we will explore ways which organizations can adopt to develop its human resources to enhance their productivity.
Communicating non-monetary benefits
Having worked with several organizations as a Consultant, employees normally complain about their organization not being able to meet their needs. They cite lack of commitment by senior management to addressing employee walfare. However, talking to employer themselves, you will be amazed by the number of benefits employers give employees. The challenge and the gap which needs to be worked is for employers to work on quantifying all non monetary benefits and showing them clearly to employees. Perhaps, a small piece of paper where all benefits like medicinal aid, annual leave, funeral cover, free airtime, access to short-term loans need to be communicated to employee oftenly.
Employee easily forget what the organization does to them and if HR does not bother and take time to constantly communicate, they will feel demotivated which results in low productively as there is a direct link between employee productivity and motivations.
The power of the story
In one of the recent in-house workshop I facilitated, I asked the participants to share with everyone one of the memorable and great experience they had with a customer. One of the participants went on to say, ‘I have helped a customer who had to travel outside the country to attend the funeral of one of his relations. He needed my services urgently to facilitate his travel. I helped the customer before his expected time and he told me, he will need to see me when he comes back. Few weeks later, he called and asked me to come in the evening with my wife for dinner. We enjoyed the mouth watering dinner and he eventually gave me some cash as a token of appreciation for the services I gave him” , It then transpired in the workshop that the rest of the employees did not know what happened.
That story has a great power to motivate the employees to work hard and serve customers diligently. You can image if the organizations have the open culture and were able to allow employees meet and share the great experience they have in their interaction with both internal and external customer. How many employees would be motivated? What could such kind of stories do to the newly recruited staff? Now if say in a month, 10 great experiences are documented and the employers create a book called ‘Memorable experience ” and they are shared among all the employees, what will that do the rest of employees?
Training
You have heard an expression which says, do not give a man the fish but rather teach him how to fish. When I see some organizations putting up a good budget for trainings, I make one conclusion..they want to teach employees how to fish. I hope you all know that it’s the employee who fish money from the customers so, why can’t we teach them how to fish the money properly. In the process of training them, the benefits employees themselves accrue are wonderful. Thus, to achieve high productivity employees need to constantly develop new skills and delete absolute ones. Organisations which do not invest in employee development will ’surely die’ as the changes in the environment are too much. This you should agree
