Entrepreneurs and managers should always look for new ways to strengthen their businesses. One of the best ways to do this is by cutting down on the downtime that you and your employees will regularly encounter at the workplace or even while working from home.
But why is downtime so bad? After all, no one should work from 9 to 5 throughout the day. People need breaks, but this doesn’t mean downtime can’t damage productivity. While some downtime is healthy for the office, too much of it can cause your company to fall behind. So how can you reduce downtime and boost productivity?
Plan Your Maintenance Schedule
Every office environment should have a maintenance schedule. But, just like your car servicing or even tax season, it can come around faster than you expect. When the time for necessary maintenance comes, there’s a risk it disrupts your current workload, and it could hinder progress and productivity. This is why planning and highlighting your schedule is so important. To make this easier, you can work with the same company each time, whether it’s https://www.procircuitinc.com/industrial-electrical/ for your electrical systems or a reputable plumbing or cybersecurity firm. You can do everything at once or stagger the servicing throughout the year.
Always Evolve Your Systems
With the rate that technology evolves, you can reduce downtime by keeping your system updated. This will ensure your company is ready for the next step in software, but there’s more to it than this. The faster the system, the more efficient your office will be. However, some systems and software will have teething problems, so while regular updates are essential, they can also come back to bite you if any severe patches are required.
Provide Employee Training
One major cause of downtime is inadequate employee training. You can solve this by providing thorough training for a wide range of requirements and roles. Employees that understand their duties – and are capable of performing them without issue – will help cultivate a more productive office with minimal downtime. This applies to both new employees and experienced employees. New employees can take time to learn the ins and outs of your business. Experienced team members can become complacent or develop bad working habits that can affect their productivity.
Show Better Flexibility
The conversation about the work-life balance has never been more relevant, and any industry that isn’t offering flexibility will encounter downtime. Failing to recognize the need for flexibility in the modern workplace can lead to issues within the office. It can lead to presenteeism, apathy, exhaustion, and burnout. These are all problems that will affect your business, but more importantly your employees. They will not feel valued or respected, and this will impact their performance and happiness, which is something you will need to fix if you want to keep them happy and ensure minimal downtime.
Focus on Employee Health
Following on from this, employee health and safety can contribute to reduced office downtime. Workplaces that allow employees to exercise and stay active while on the job will find a dramatic improvement. The natural rush that comes from exercise can benefit your business and enhance productivity. There is also the safety element. Staff that feel safe at work will be more confident when they walk through the door. What’s more, proper safety procedures can limit (and hopefully eliminate) downtime caused by workplace injuries. If everyone knows how to operate machinery or how to respond to incidents within the office, employee health will remain a priority and help develop an efficient workplace.
Prioritize Your Projects
The process of eating the frog, however strange it might sound, is something that can dramatically boost productivity and eliminate downtime. Eating the frog is where you tackle the trickiest project first, but not enough people do this. These large projects are intimidating, and so employees look for smaller projects to ‘warm up’. This is an issue, though, as these smaller tasks can sometimes take longer than expected, which means you have less time to complete the bigger tasks. If you get the most challenging project out of the way, you’ll feel motivated and prepared to do whatever is next, which will make it easier to stay focused and reduce your office downtime.
Productivity
A productive workplace needn’t be somewhere everyone works themselves to the bone. If anything, this can have the opposite effect and do more harm than good. Still, you can always find ways to reduce downtime at your workplace to ensure better productivity and efficiency across the board.
