Australian entrepreneurship is currently on a steady rise and has been so for a while. From the perspective of both global and local economy, this sounds like a good thing, however, when it comes to competitiveness and odds of succeeding in the business world, things are not as great. Fortunately, with just a bit of innovativeness, you can achieve quite a bit. The first task you’ll face is the one of raising your productivity. Here are five tips to help you out in this regard.
1. Don’t make the place too crowded
Even though relocating is a hard and expensive thing to do, keeping too many people in a condensed office space will drastically reduce their productivity. Fortunately, there are several ways to handle this situation and it’s up to you to make a choice based on your budget and goals. Moving the office would be a natural first suggestion, however, seeing as how the topic itself is concerned with the pre-existing topic, we’ll skip this suggestion and go straight to the concept of shared office space. Other than this, you can also allow some of your employees to work from home, which shouldn’t be an issue for a cloud-based business.
2. Reduce the number of distractions
Another thing you need to do is think about all the stimuli that are making it impossible for your employees to focus on the task at hand. The first major enemy is the noise and there are several ways for you to handle it. The most expensive yet also the most efficient one is to outfit your entire team with noise-canceling earphones and even go as far as to invest in silent keyboards. As for the visual distractions, by keeping the place clean and avoiding using any flashy ornaments as office decoration, you’ll already do quite a bit for your team’s ability to focus. Finally, you also need to think about tactile distractions, which happen when your employees can’t travel across the room freely but have to squeeze in between the desks of their coworkers. This particular problem, however, has a solution described in the previous sections.
3. A pleasant environment is a productive one
The next thing you need to bear in mind is the fact that noise and visual distractions aren’t the only things affecting the workability of your employees. The temperature within the room, the coziness of the place and the freshness of air often get underestimated by entrepreneurs. The first can be handled by finding a reliable agency specializing in air conditioning installation in Sydney and getting a unit that’s suitable for your office size. The coziness can be improved with an investment in ergonomic furniture while the freshness of air depends on your indoor jungle.
4. Adequate equipment
The equipment that your team will have to deal with has a massive impact on their efficiency and the time it takes for them to handle even the simplest of tasks. Needless to say, it also impacts the amount of exhaustion (both physical and mental) that they’ll undergo after completing the task. In some scenarios, it will also have an impact on the likelihood that they’ll get injured. Different tasks require different types of equipment. While forklifts and trolleys may be vital in the office warehouse, on the office floor, the efficiency and availability of printers will make all the difference. Same goes for the number of available sockets, seeing as how your team will have to charge all the devices that they’re using for work. Fortunately, nowadays this can be handled with an innovative gadget such as a wireless charger.
5. Outsourcing maintenance
Watering a plant is definitely not a task that will take too much of your employees’ time, but if someone has to get up from their workstation in order to do it, this might just become a major productivity issue. Therefore, watering your plants, cleaning the place and taking out the trash needs to be delegated to people from the cleaning agency. Also, unless you want the tech-savviest of your employees to be constantly nagged by all of their coworkers, you need to outsource IT maintenance to a specialized agency.
To make the long story short, what you need to do is create a scenario where your staff can focus on their core tasks with virtually no distractions. Seeing as how this is impossible, an environment that has as little distractions as possible will have to do. At the end of the day, it all may come down to individual traits of your team, but providing them with adequate work conditions is the least you can do to help them live up to their full potential.
