Productivity in lockdown

Increase productivity working from home

Even working from home, the productivity of employees should be measurable.

In order to do this, the tasks to be completed need to be communicated with clarity with a purposeful outcome.

This can then be tracked through a reporting mechanism.

This short video explains how one of my clients is implementing this.

(JK) We are now into the fifth week of lockdown and work goes on.

I’m sure, for many of your clients, productivity is one of the key factors in the business right now to keep things rocking.

So, do you have any examples of late of one of your clients and what you’ve done to help them with their productivity?

(FD) So, as you say, we are in week five and people have been working from home now for all this time.

One of my clients, like many other business owners, was concerned that people are going to be working from home, that has never happened with the whole team or teams even.

So how do you make sure that productivity is as good as when they were in the office?

I advised him quite early on to basically make sure that he was very clear with his five key people what he wanted to achieve in the business every week.

I said

Every Friday, just make sure that for the next week you communicate with your five key team members, i.e. your sales director, marketing director, operations manager and finance director. Communicate what you want them to achieve for the following week. And they need to, in turn, communicate it to their team.

Now, we often talk about communication. It has to be frequent.

Frequency is great, but the communication needs to take place with an outcome.

Communication for the sake of communication isn’t going to really achieve much. So, what is the purpose of communication? That leads me to the third point, which is how do you track productivity?

What they agreed was that once they knew what the tasks they wanted to achieve, they would be an email at the end of the week or every day.

Each team had had their own way of doing it. But something to explain in writing that the task had been achieved.

Then there is a good level of accountability. People are reporting in and so you can track productivity.

(JK) Fantastic, and would you say morale is high at the moment?

(FD) Morale is pretty good because people are communicating with each other and they can see that the business is running pretty much as it was.

We don’t know when we’re going to come out of it, but they’re going to come out of it and feel that they can continue working in the business.

I think actually they are going to feel like they’ve come out stronger.

(JK) So what is going to happen with these people next?

(FD) So productivity has been monitored even before lockdown because I have been working with this client for quite a long time. And he spent a lot of time setting key performance indicators for each of his employees.

Those are now going to be shared company-wide so that each department can see how they have been doing.

They are going to be shared probably this week. Then we can see the progress, which I think is going to be even better for morale because they can see that actually they are doing pretty well.

Does this resonate with you? If you would like to book a complimentary, no-obligation, coaching session to discuss this further, please email me at falgunidesai@actioncoach.com