There’s a common misconception that working a 60-hour week will enable you to succeed faster in your business. We get that guilty feeling when we show up late or leave early, and the staff in the office til the wee hours are often the ones praised for their efforts – whether it is productive or not.
Yet are logged hours really the best indication of productivity and effectiveness?
What if we were to change the mindset and make work about being effective instead of exhausting?
Our world is moving towards dollar-per-hour accumulation instead of looking at the outcome. Yet productivity has been proven to drop at the 50-hour mark and begins to drop rapidly after 55 hours.
Working longer hours creates further health issues and a higher turnover of staff, so why are we continuing to believe in this mindset of longer hours = a hard worker?
What if we were to change our thinking and make it outcome focused instead of hour focused? Here are some ways to make use of your time and cut your hours down for the same results.
1.Utilise technology
Technology is taking over and we are anticipating a huge increase in robots working on manufacturing floors. This means that we need to embrace technology and understand how we can make the most of it, instead of avoiding it. Consider organising your teams hours to utilise and embrace new technology to work smarter and not harder. Look at your business and warehouse as a production line and understand how you can integrate technology in with your business.
BizTip: Understand how technology can fit in with your job and don’t be afraid to embrace the productivity of technology.
2. Count the minutes and seconds
As Pareto’s rule outlines, 80 percent of your productivity is from 20 percent of the time you spent creating it.
Spend some time tracking your efforts and look at where your effective time is being spent.
BizTip: Encourage your team members to track their time and look at where their productivity is going.
Ask each department to analyse where 20 percent of their time that is extremely productive is going and see how they can cut out unnecessary tasks.
3. Make it worthwhile – incentive based
Studies have shown that employees gain further motivation through incentives. Consider options like profit-sharing programs, KPI rewards and achievement parties.
Introducing incentives increases company culture and also can significantly impact profit due to the team feeling a further incentive to work hard. This is a powerful motivator to get the team to work harder.
BizTip: Consider an incentive based structure so that your team will be motivated to work harder in less time.
