A simple question but an important one that may arise is the parameter which should employ to measure employee productivity which can be measured in any business or project. Their multiple means and ways to measure the required.

One is the qualitative method that can help you analyses the quality of the work that is being produced by the said employee and the second is quantitative methods by tracking costs and time to compare that against the results produced, amongst the two easier the quantitative method as the end result is in hard numbers and helps business determines its way forward based on performance that can be judged through numbers.

Employee and office/factory efficiency are a little like the oxygen we breathe for sustenance. It plays an important role in keeping your company prospering and thriving. So when you have a workforce that produces results and is usually self-starter nothing should worry you.

But

If there is a pregnant pause in productivity and things become laboured, it can affect the run of the mill operations and even the most standard procedures may come to halt.
The costs and overhead of ignoring lagging employee productivity and the basic unhealthy company culture are steep and one of the main reasons where the employee does not find a carrot as a reward to work for, as the newest study suggests. Disengaged employees have higher rates of absenteeism and turnover, which can drag down profits and even limits the company’s prospects of growth and progression.

A simple yet at the same time complex and intricate questions that may bother/make every employer curious are:

But how do you get to that point?
What turns a poor performer into a productivity powerhouse?
How do you make your employees more productive?

The answer to these questions is very simple and can yield great results, making both the employers and employees go an extra mile…..

The vital thing here is also to understand the importance of employee productivity
The resolution or a primary goal for any company is to be successful and fruitful in its endeavours, we all are aware the effectiveness and productivity of an employee can make or break the success of a company. There are two main elements which conclude whether employees are successful at their work:

Productivity – the amount of work completed
Effectiveness is the amount of effort put into that work

Some people may spend a lot of time finishing a small amount of work, these individuals are more effective than productive, as they are meticulous about the task they perform and are more focused on the quality of the work.

Some individuals may get a lot of work done in a small amount of time these people are more productive than effective, as they are able to produce more work in the given time than the aforementioned.

As an employee, you should focus on both your productivity and your effectiveness, and should aim to put maximum effort into your given task or work, and accomplish as much work as you can as efficiently and as effectively as possible.

You can achieve and reap a lot of benefits and success in a given company if you are able to produce the desired results because if the employee generates good results, the business:
Becomes More Profitable
Grows
Meets Consumer Demand
Remains Competitive

In essence, any company to be relevant in the market and to survive the employees need to be motivated enough to yield positive, not only positive but profitable results.
Below are some points, which are important and need to be kept in mind while dealing/running day-to-day operations that shall increase employee productivity at work.

Delegate= Divide Responsibilities

Delegation is a very important and vital for employees and employer as it develops confidence in the workforce that the management considers them responsible/ trust them enough to delegate the with certain task or jobs.

The sense of delegations also carries some amount of risk; as if under-performed it may cause reputation to the company. But according to multiple studies, when qualified employees are given responsibilities and trusted with their jobs they achieve great results and perform the task with utmost commitment and passion.

The delegation also enhances the ownership towards the given task and at a certain level towards the overall organization as well. So if given chance to the employees to mature their skills and get leadership experience, it will in the larger picture benefit the employer only and for the individual, it would fulfil them with a sense of achievement that would help them later in the career as well.

Reduce Distractions

At workplace “The more, The Merrier” proverb doesn’t apply, you should try and ensure certain policies that curb distractions, for instance, excessive usage of phone and social media. You should not be imposing “A NO-PHONE Policy” but at the same time keep them engaged and focused in a way that they can have that breathing room while performing their tasks.

For example: encourage employees not to use their phones while working, but allow them to take short breaks at regular intervals to check their phones/social media, one thing that will be a guarantee to the employers would be the time spent at the desk, while working would be surely more productive, with better output.

Improve workplace environment

One thing that must be kept in mind is to keep your “employee comfortable” provide him/her with an environment that the focus and energies remain on the task at hand rather than constantly turning the conditioner up or down, keep the environment cosy and calm according to the relevant season, remember to set thermostats accordingly in summers and winters for that set an ideal temperature that seems like a perfect atmosphere to be working in.

Practice Positive Reinforcement

It is a proven fact that when the employees are motivated and encouraged they perform better, employees do not only feel motivated through financial rewards or incentives, although these rewards go long way if on performance an employee can earn a commission or a holiday package or a voucher to its favourite restaurant.

But providing constructive criticism, helping the employ by working through his grey areas, celebrating his success although with one small “Samosa” can cultivate a sense of fulfilment and a sense contentedness that would motivate them more and they’re more likely to put increased productivity high up on their to-do list.

Stress- A no Starter for Productivity

A stressful and tense workplace will not yield any kind of results and would definitely hamper the productivity of an Employee. Workers that constantly function under highly stressful conditions are found to be less productive and have higher levels of disconnection and absenteeism from their workplace and their assigned roles as well.

One thing that needs to be repeated as a “MANTRA” is that they need to be happy and relaxed! That doesn’t mean that they should have no deadlines or no tasks that shall be linked to their performance evaluation. But it means that they shouldn’t be pressed enough or panicked to make it sound like do-or-die situation for them.

A qualified and self-starter employee would value the employer’s given space and trust and would definitely perform to his utmost potential and produce quantifiable results.
If you want your staff to work to perform best of their ability, try out things like open communication, focus on confidence-building measures and self-care, it is eminent that company culture has trust and belief amongst the co-workers and should function as a team.

The sense of belonging can yield great results as people who hate their jobs and feel subjugated and disqualified or underappreciated may go through the motions, but burnout is all but inevitable.

So the ingredients mentioned above are vital to the company’s culture and overall productivity. While creating a company culture that fosters positive morale isn’t always easy, the important thing is to just start and show that you care.

Encourage independence/self-sufficiency by not micromanaging

According to the experts, one of the main ingredients to increase the productivity of an employee is to ask the superiors to back-off. The best way forward is to encourage and motivate individuals to take ownership and be in charge of their assigned task and effectively manage their own time and resources in a way that saves time and money of an organization.

“This is a wonderfully self-correcting process: we want people who are self-starters and are able to operate independently. Granting workers freedom over when, how, and where they work creates proof of their work ethic in a way that trying to control them cannot.” (Source: Slaughter)

According to the scientific study, it has been proven that when employs are given autonomy and freedom of decision making they are motivated and feel more empowered, it also works more effectively than even financial rewards.

Usually, micromanagement is like a second skin to the managers as they cannot keep their hands-off their organizational affairs and are in habit of it. The managers and the superiors need to work over more strategic level than constantly working on day to day operations and managing these tasks that need to delegate.

Trust me….being out of the mix is actually pretty hard as the managers are in habit of being part of the mix at every level. The managers need to coach their sub-ordinates to manage their affairs rather than constantly doing it for them.

When manager continuously hovers over the employees the employee gets confused and tend to perform slower or poor and is a continuous, unproductive loop.so they need to give the space and level playing field to their employees to help them grow and become a self-starter and self-sufficient.

“At higher levels managers usually need to dial down their operational focus and learn how to be more strategic,” (Source: Harvard Business Review)
Managers hover. Employees get nervous and perform poorly. So managers continue to hover.

It’s true in romance, and it’s true in business
“Communication is the key to success”

One thing that needs to be ensured and remembered is that without effective, two-way communication, affiliations end and businesses fail. Bosses who efficiently communicate clear expectations and duties to their employees will be satisfied with an engaged, dynamic workforce.

Create a culture of positive communication, at your workplace and reap the benefits of effective communication. A CRM Learning article posits that 80% of a work-related conversation is spent on the problems of the past. That includes assigning blame, which is counter-productive in an organization and yields no results.
15% of the time is spent on what’s happening now and what should be done presently. And the amount of time spent discussing solutions and future possibilities? A tiny 5% of the time is spent on discussing the future and strategizing it as the importance of team communication is supreme. Focusing on the future instead of rehashing past issues demonstrates your commitment to moving forward. And that helps you find positive solutions. (Source: CRM Learning)

This is no way a novel idea to ignore past experiences and not learn from experiences, but you should have a positive approach to any situation in a productive way.

“For example, if a meeting is held to address something like decreased productivity, the meeting itself will be more productive if it begins by pointing out positives that have also occurred recently,” according to CRM. (Source: CRM Learning)

Increase employee satisfaction with great perks

One of the great perks that can be offered to the employees is health insurance, with increasing health and medical expenses, it has been a big burden on an employee salary to manage the expenses in the salary earned. So, one of the benefit to retain employees is to provide them health insurance benefits, that covers hospitalization, pre-and-post medical expenses and add-on covers can also be bought depending on the employee’s needs and organizational structure.

Smart and customized plans as per your organization’s requirements can be availed through Smartchoice.pk, by just logging on the website and providing few details, that would enable the smartchoice team to contact you and to take the process further to facilitate to your chosen plan…
So just get insured right away!

Khurram Zahid

The post How to increase employee productivity? Guidelines based on Pakistan workforce scenario appeared first on Smartchoice.pk.

The reason this thing is so vital to us is that even after a global spread of internet, some remote areas that lack the resources and infrastructure to deploy typically available internet solutions can now have internet without any major investment as the infrastructure/hardware needed to implement this newly devised solution is already in place. Almost 4 billion people that currently don’t have resources to access the internet can benefit from this. Using off-the-shelf LEDs and solar cells, Harald Haas and his team have pioneered a new technology that transmits data using light, and it may just be the key to bridging the digital divide. Read on to find out more about what the future of the Internet could look like.

Imagine using your car headlights to transmit data or surfing the web safely on a plane, tethered only by a line of sight. Harald Haas is working on it. He currently holds the Chair of Mobile Communications at the University of Edinburgh, and is co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer of pureLiFi Ltd as well as the Director of the LiFi Research and Development Center at the University of Edinburgh.

Haas has long been studying ways to communicate electronic data signals, designing modulation techniques that pack more data onto existing networks. But his latest work leaps beyond wires and radio waves to transmit data via an LED bulb that glows and darkens faster than the human eye can see. It’s called Li-Fi, an acronym for Light Fidelity and his group has published the first proof-of-concept results demonstrating that it is possible to to turn commercially available light emitting diode (LED) light bulbs into broadband wireless transmission systems. Let’s have a look at how Li-Fi works.

Li-Fi, or Light Fidelity, uses off-the-shelf LEDs to transmit data incredibly fast, and also in a safe and secure manner. Data is transported by the light,encoded in subtle changes of the brightness. If we look around, we have many LEDs around us, so there’s a rich infrastructure of Li-Fi transmitters around us. But so far, we have been using special devices — small photo detectors, to receive the information encoded in the data. I wanted to find a way to also use existing infrastructure to receive data from our Li-Fi lights. And this is why I have been looking into solar cells and solar panels.

A solar cell absorbs light and converts it into electrical energy. This is why we can use a solar cell to charge our mobile phone. But now we need to remember that the data is encoded in subtle changes of the brightness of the LED, so if the incoming light fluctuates, so does the energy harvested from the solar cell. This means we have a principal mechanism in place to receive information from the light and by the solar cell, because the fluctuations of the energy harvested correspond to the data transmitted.

Of course the question is: can we receive very fast and subtle changes of the brightness, such as the ones transmitted by our LED lights? And the answer to that is yes, we can. We have shown in the lab that we can receive up to 50 megabytes per second from a standard, off-the-shelf solar cell. And this is faster than most broadband connections these days.

And you may wonder, what’s the point? And the point is this: There will be a massive extension of the Internet to close the digital divide, and also to allow for what we call “The Internet of Things” — tens of billions of devices connected to the Internet. However such an extension of the Internet can only work if it’s almost energy-neutral. This means we need to use existing infrastructure as much as possible. And this is where the solar cell and the LED come in. It’s also designed to work in all sorts of weather conditions including fog and haze.

What’s really important here is that a solar cell has become a receiver for high-speed wireless signals encoded in light, while it maintains its primary function as an energy-harvesting device. That’s why it is possible to use existing solar cells on the roof of a hut to act as a broadband receiver from a laser station on a close by hill, or indeed, lamp post. And It really doesn’t matter where the beam hits the solar cell. And the same is true for translucent solar cells integrated into windows, solar cells integrated into street furniture, or indeed, solar cells integrated into these billions of devices that will form the Internet of Things. Because simply, we don’t want to charge these devices regularly, or worse, replace the batteries every few months.

For now, it is very much a lab demonstration, a prototype. But Haas and his team are confident that we can take this to market within the next two to three years. And they hope they will be able to contribute to closing the digital divide, and also contribute to connecting all these billions of devices to the Internet. And all of this without causing a massive explosion of energy consumption — because of the solar cells, quite the opposite.

Quite frankly we think that this is a really fascinating as well as useful evolution, more so because of the fact that it doesn’t need any major investment and the existing infrastructure is also already in place, along with the fact that it doesn’t have any impact on the energy consumption. Hence it could prove to be a very successful endeavor in the near future once the technology matures. What do you think? Let us know below!

Khurram Zahid

The post Li-Fi Brings Internet Access to Remote Areas! appeared first on Smartchoice.pk.