Productive, satisfied, and motivated employees form the backbone of any successful business. Your team is made up of talented individuals who can get things done and help your organization to reach its key goals and objectives. The key to maximizing their productivity and wellness is to ensure that every department in your business—including HR—works together to ensure that your talent feels good about working for you.
Your human resources processes need to be designed to offer great experiences to your employees. Their well-being should be at the forefront of your HR efforts. Your HR practices should support them throughout their journeys with your organization to drive them to fuel your own growth and theirs.
Your HR processes can be optimized to keep your employees productive and well, whether they’re working in-office or in a virtual environment. In this article, we’ll explore 7 key ways you can use HR to balance employee wellness with maximum productivity.
- Communicate Transparently
Your employees won’t know what you expect of them or how to work towards achieving your company goals if these expectations and goals are not apparent. Your HR team needs to communicate clearly and transparently with your talent at all times to relay goals and expectations without the risk of confusion or error.
Ensuring that your employees always know what’s expected of them will positively impact employee productivity and create a healthy culture of open communication in the workplace. In turn, this can lower employee turnover rates.
- Build Sustainable Routines
Effective time management plays an essential role in maintaining employee productivity while avoiding burnout and stress. Your HR department should build sustainable routines that reduce distractions and allow employees to focus their full concentration and energy on a task.
The better your employees are able to establish routines that work for them, the better they’ll be equipped to handle their day-to-day responsibilities without missing any critical tasks.
- Encourage Regular Breaks
It may seem counter-intuitive, but employees who take regular breaks are actually more productive than their peers who rarely take time out. Breaks allow employees to refocus, recharge, and maintain a high level of concentration and motivation over time. They also help to minimize the risk of burnout.
Some organizations find it helpful to schedule team break meetings, in which workers can take a break and interact with their colleagues on a more casual basis. Others find that mandating regular breaks helps them to maintain a productive workforce, even during their busiest periods!
- Prioritize Flexibility
Now that remote work has become the ‘new normal’ for dozens of industries, many employees are seeking out employers who offer them flexibility in terms of how, when, and where they work. Maintaining flexibility in the workplace can effectively boost productivity. Plus, it helps workers to maintain a healthier work-life balance.
You could introduce more flexibility by offering part-time or full-time remote work opportunities or switching to flexible hours or annualized hour systems where possible. You could even introduce a 4-day workweek. Tech giant Microsoft experienced a 40% increase in productivity after switching to a 4-day week system. If you aren’t sure how to implement flexibility within your organization, run a survey and analyze your employees’ feedback to discover how they’d like to take advantage of more flexible work opportunities.
- Provide the Right Tools and Resources
If you want to maintain a high degree of employee productivity over time, you need to ensure your HR department plays a crucial role in helping them stay organized and efficient. You can achieve this by providing your teams with the resources and tools they need to stay organized at all times.
These can include physical tools like whiteboards, organizers, planners and diaries, and digital tools such as project management platforms, time management tools, and scheduling apps. Ensure that all the tools you provide are well suited to the needs of your employees and use the latest technologies to avoid frustrating delays and unexpected downtime.
- Assist Employees In Managing Distractions
Distractions cause significant losses in productivity across virtually every modern industry and sector. Helping your employees to minimize internal and external distractions is an effective way to boost productivity. Start by identifying your team’s most frustrating distractions. Thereafter, team up with your employees to create strategies that minimize them.
This can be more challenging to achieve if your employees are working remotely. In these cases, you could establish a smart work environment that encourages your talent to work certain numbers of hours per day or per week in a quiet, distraction-free environment.
Your HR department could also share tips and tricks with your teams. They could advise them to turn off notifications while tackling important tasks, only check emails and messages during allocated times, and use tech filters to save personal messages for breaks and off-times.
- Focus on Employee Recognition
The strongest and most resilient organizations have employees who are not only productive but feel satisfied, supported, and well at the same time. One way to prioritize your employees’ well-being is to create a culture of employee recognition and celebration in the workplace. Acknowledging people for their efforts, applauding their personal development, and rewarding them for work well done incentivizes them to maintain a high level of productivity. Plus, it helps to ensure they feel valued and recognized for their contributions.
Considering that more than 36% of employees leave their positions due to a lack of recognition, focusing on employee recognition could help to minimize employee turnover. Encourage your team members to support and recognize each other as well; social capital from peers is just as essential as recognition and praise from management and executives!
The Bottom Line
Focusing on employee wellness and productivity can significantly advance your business toward reaching its goals in a sustainable way. This approach can also help you to retain talent while supporting employees on their journeys towards achieving career development and optimal work-life balances.
Work with your HR department to create holistic strategies that not only boost your employees’ productivity and output but ensure that they are happy and fulfilled while they work towards your objectives. You may soon be leading a more resilient organization as a result.