Over the last few years, there have been many advancements and changes introduced to the workplace. As such, employee performance and productivity are bound to fluctuate. With remote, hybrid, and onsite work structures that exist both online and offline, what exactly do employees need? In fact, falling employee productivity is something many experts are still racking their brains to figure out. Experts are deducing that employees are working more yet producing less. Here, we cover a few reasons that may be contributing factors to the lack of employee productivity, as well as what this means for businesses.
Although there isn’t a set reason for this – as the economy and world is going through so many changes, it's almost impossible to highlight just one reason – there are a few predictions of what may be the culprit for this. Topics like “Quiet Quitting” where burned-out employees are slowly losing motivation to do more than required at their jobs, have been largely spoken about online recently as well. There are a few possible explanations as to why employees may lack commitment at work:
Communication works both ways – top down, and side to side, so you will need to communicate with employees, but also allow them the space and room to voice out their issues and struggles. Employees who are unaware of or less involved in their company’s happenings are less likely to care. Largely because of a lack of understanding, employees who are not on the same page as managers might not be as motivated to provide solutions for issues faced by the company – hence, the lack of productivity. Likewise, employees who feel unheard or uncared for will inevitably be less productive, and will result in a reduced feeling of engagement with both their work, and their workplace..
Another reason employees feel unmotivated is because of a lack of tasks delegated to them. This may result in employees feeling less important or that they contribute less to the company and thus, productivity levels decline. On the other hand, however, an employee who is assigned too many tasks at once may face overload, inevitably causing them to disengage, which also impacts productivity at work.
When workflows or task-flows are not well organised, it results intons of back and forths which can drag task completion and cause employees to feel burnt out. This may be caused by a lack of implementation of technology that can help your business stay organised and on top of tasks. A great solution to this is to implement workflow management softwares such as clickup, that can help with the delegation of tasks, the organisation of tasks as well as the tracking of task progression. This way, employees can rest at ease knowing that all tasks to be done can be visually displayed on the board, so everyone knows what's going on – including who has the baton and who to pass it to next.
This means that more businesses will start working with smaller teams, where each employee has to be more diverse and wear multiple hats. This also means it will become all the more crucial for companies to invest in tech help (automation) softwares and programmes to aid in workflows. Employers are also required to listen even more closely to employees and really understand how they feel about their work, in order to better accommodate them, which will positively impact productivity and passion. There is also a need for mutual understanding between managers and the younger generation (aka Gen Zs) on how they view work – times are different now and in order to retain Gen Z employees, managers are required to understand how this generation works with more flexibility and with more of an emphasis on sustaining mental health. We can see a very visible divide between managers of older generations and workers of the younger generation – probably due to lack of understanding and openness to change.
Though this topic is still being heavily debated as changes in workplaces keep on taking place, there is a clear growing trend that should be understood, and this understanding should be applied to your business to keep productivity high. The team at INTERLUNAR is always more than happy to provide any form of help and guidance needed for adapting your business.