Factors to Improve Productivity (Part 1)

For small businesses, improving productivity is not about making wholesale changes to the way you do business, and it is not about injecting a large pool of funds to improve production outputs. Rather, productivity is achieved by developing consistent improvement measures that make your existing systems, and people, more effective over time.

What is Productivity?

At its most basic level, productivity is the relationship between output and input – how many materials and labor hours you have to put into a work process to achieve a certain quantity and quality of output. To increase productivity, you have to change one part of the relationship.

In other words, improving productivity means either reducing the amount of materials and labor you’re putting into the process, or increasing the level of output for the same quantity of input. That’s productivity in a nutshell.

Why Might a Business Wish to Improve its Productivity?

For businesses of any size, an increase in productivity is almost always accompanied by an increase in profits. That’s because you’re getting more output from the same level of input resources. A key task of management is to keep an eye on productivity and continuously improve it.

Productivity in the workplace is not just a topic that affects business owners, however. It also affects the workforce on a personal level. Research tells us that productive people feel less stressed, achieve faster and better results, are more successful in their job and have a more optimized work-life balance. These people are happy, and happy people are likely to stay in their jobs rather than seek new opportunities elsewhere.

What Factors Improve Productivity?

An incredible variety of factors affect productivity and the good news is, even small improvements in the process flow can make a big difference. For businesses starting out on this journey, a good entry point is to look at the things that are killing productivity in your organization, and then finding strategies to help eradicate the specific problems you are facing.

Here are some common productivity killers:

• Noise and distraction by emails, phone calls or colleagues
• Constant accessibility
• Unnecessary meetings
• Unstructured and inefficient workflows
• Unclear or unachievable goals
• Lack of automation for routine tasks
• Slow and outdated technology
• Too much workload, with an inability to delegate
• Inadequate breaks or vacation time
• ….and many more.

For employees, what these productivity killers boil down to is stress. According to the American Institute of Stress, four out of every 10 U.S. workers believe that their job is very or extremely stressful, and almost 30 percent of workers feel burned out as a result. Stress reduces your ability to focus, which in turn reduces productivity. Addressing the factors that cause stress would be a good approach here as a preventive measure.

Source: Smallbusiness