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Every manager wants their workers to be as efficient as possible in their work, but many aren’t sure where to begin in encouraging better habits. Below are 5 tips that can help any manager to maintain a more efficient and effective workforce.
Give Your Workers Creative Space
If you want to get the most out of your workers, then you need to breed good habits and institute clear workflows that they can follow. However, if you are too regimented in your approach, then you risk hampering your workers’ creative impulses and denying them the space that they need to thrive. Workers who feel like they are under a particularly strict regime are less likely to think outside the box out of fear of being reprimanded.
As the manager, it is up to you to set the tone for your business and decide what kind of environment you want to create. You should have enough faith in your workers’ abilities and your own hiring abilities to trust that they know what they are doing. As long as you provide them with the right environment, giving them space to be creative can lead to new thinking and benefits both them and your business as a whole.
Delegate Like a Pro
Every manager is different and there are innumerable approaches they might adopt in formulating their own management style. However, there are certain core skills and competencies that any manager needs to have in order to thrive in their role. One of those key skills is the ability to delegate work effectively.
Delegation is at the heart of what a manager does – directing the other members of your team and making sure that everyone has a task to do and every task is being seen to by somebody. But good delegation is about more than just assigning work to your employees; delegating effectively means understanding your workers well enough to know what their individual strengths and weaknesses are. It also means appreciating the nature of the work you are assigning and knowing what skills, beyond the obvious ones, will lead to the best results.
Adopt the Agile Approach
The agile approach to business management is all about encouraging your workers to collaborate with one another and unite behind a single common purpose and vision. By improving the efficiency that your teams operate with and developing a consistent workflow for each of them, you will enable them to experiment with new ideas and function effectively whether they are working in isolation or in concert with one another.
Creating an agile organization isn’t as complicated as it might sound. It will take time and consistency in your approach, but if you are motivated to make your organization more agile, then making the necessary changes is easier than you might think. For example, the Kanban board is a powerful tool for visualizing workflows and progressing through them more efficiently. The Kanbanize platform provides access to digital Kanban boards, along with a suite of other SaaS tools that are geared towards agile organizations. They also have a wide range of Kanban resources and Agile resources that will be helpful for any business looking to become more agile.
Communication Is Key
It is impossible to overstate how important good communications are for a successful business. If your goal is to improve efficiency, then this should be your number one priority. Not only do you need to communicate with your workers, but you need to encourage them to communicate with you and with one another. Having one really good communicator at the head of a business isn’t going to cut it.
There will no doubt be some valuable members of your team that aren’t very good communicators. Weaving these people into the tapestry of your workforce can be a challenge. Try to pair your poor communicators with good communicators who have the patience to work with someone who isn’t as good at expressing themselves. With time and encouragement, you can help your shier workers to come out of their shells and communicate more effectively.
Always Have Clearly Defined Goals
If you want to keep your workers motivated and happy, you need to have clear objectives and goals for them. It is when workers are idle and left to twiddle their thumbs that the problems begin. Procrastination is the enemy of efficiency and workers who don’t feel like they have any solid goals or objectives are much more likely to succumb to this temptation. By providing your team with clear objectives to focus on, you help to keep their eyes on the price and their efficiency at a maximum.
With the right management approach, you will naturally encourage your workers to work efficiently – you won’t need to drag it out of them. Consistency will be the key to making your changes stick. Once you have made efficiency a priority, put it at the heart of everything you do.