In the past, employees are compelled to work up to 15 hours a day because of the factory's demand- they needed to work with time and robots hadn’t been brought to existence. It wasn’t long before both employees and employers start seeing the adverse effect and can’t sustain companies for a long time.
One of the US's biggest companies, Ford being a reputable car company known with inventions and streamlining workers' efficiency, has increased productivity on a whole new level in the last 5 years. Employees are not forced to stay working for long before they go home and refresh for another day.
As it stands now, an employee's average working hours are about 8 hours, but these hours are not fully utilized up for work. Employees check social platforms for news feed, more extended Lunchtime, discussion among colleagues. This careless attitude shown by employees is costing the American economy about five hundred billion dollars a year. This is just for a country, which is about 4% of the world's population. That’s a lot of money wasted for poor optimization of time leading to reduced productivity.
Solving the Productivity Problem
This is a big challenge that requires a solution as soon as possible. Employees are lazy despite reducing hours to enhance productivity. But the manager should come up with a plan that will boost the collective productivity. How can this be solved if the problem is a general one?
Prevent Exhaustion of Workers
Tired workers are prone to making mistakes. As a leader, you must be interested in the welfare of your team members. Don’t push them too hard! If care is not taken, you might work them to breaking point and burnout — by then, mistakes are inevitable.
Managers should develop skills that enable them to recognized member stress limits and stop them from working when you notice it. This could be done by using certain online apps and tools that help to calculate workflow or analyzing project details and see how best to streamline project tasks.
Break Up the Tasks Around Serious Focus Time
Naturally, human brains are developed to give about 4-5 hours of concentration per day. It is essential you prioritize tasks for proper organization. Calculating how many hours the big task will take to execute and plan to effectively distribute it among team members without reaching their stress limits. With this, your team can operate at a high level of productivity while still working on minor tasks within the general 8-hour work per day.
Longer Time don't give Equal Better Productivity
Have you ever find yourself working on a big project and get stuck at it, thinking if you give more time, you will provide an ideal solution? Well, it does not work that way. Students in the university who cram will do less than students who break course lumps to understand over a longer timeframe.
Long hours of work are usually the cause of mental and physical fatigue. It takes time to recover from fatigue; fatigue can run from the last working hours of a day to the next day and that’s a significant loss to productivity. A worker who goes back to work after some hours’ rest will have low productivity in the morning. The next day even gets worse and the work then adds to the pain of the stress again. As time goes on, the worker will start making some minor errors that are not noticed immediately and found after the big projects have been executed and discover a loophole somewhere — wasted effort!
Employees running out of things to do could be one reason why long hours can lead to reduced productivity. Some tasks should be prioritized and execute as soon as possible while some can be done at any time. A delivery truck might decide to deliver more products to the warehouse in the absence of orders. The company has to wait on orders before delivery paths could take another turn. A researcher has to wait for the experiment to run before analyzing results, and so on. Workers with high productivity will probably finish his tasks before the closing hours and use extra hours to relax or work on minor tasks. Most workers prefer switching to their social lives after they finish the day's work to see what’s going on out there.
Another reason for reduced productivity has to do with undisciplined workers. Some of them are addicted to social platforms like Facebook, Twitter among others. The valuable time for executing tasks are being used to enjoy social vibes. Managers will face a big challenge to track these workers and ensure that they are on task. Employees might put-on on hard-working behavior, but the productivity is quite below expectations. A worker might finish work early and stay at his desk all day waiting for the boss to go home to avoid being criticized for slack work.
How does it sound? Short working hours increase productivity enormously. Yes, it’s true; workers don’t need to work long hours while trying to meet the deadline. Mistakes are reduced to the minimum because employees are more refreshed to work and tasks can be broken down in small units and execute among team members.
Shorter Work Days Leads to Fewer Sick leave
You discover your team members are calling for sick leave because they are not feeling okay. This is because they work for long hours; the stress has accumulated, resulting in an usual condition in their body system. When stress levels are reached, employees feel decreased alertness, less active, less exercise and body wear and tear. This might require urgent medical attention.
When employees are not happy at their desks, it could because their lives cycles have begun to revolve around work and sleep. As a manager, you don’t want a worker coming to work with a depressed spirit; you want them to be motivated and contribute actively to the project.
Conclusion
It is crucial to build a healthy work-life to increase productivity both on a small and larger scale. Tasks should be delegated to team members and quality time within a team's energetic spirit should be given. Managers should know how to optimize work processes and get the best out of employees in the shortest time possible.