The Atlassian shares that alarmingly, only 60% or less of work time is spent productively. Have you noticed a decrease in your business's productivity? Your employees will cost your organisation time and money if productivity falters, and it doesn’t stop there. Lower productivity can damage customers' perception of your business and even convince them to look elsewhere when they need products and services.
Lower productivity causes a decrease in the quality of your workforce. Productivity is vital for a healthy, profitable workforce and business, and on a larger scale: a prosperous economy and lower productivity will lead to a series of different issues. But, even in today’s digital age, productivity is not easily achieved with increased technology adoption.
What is Low Productivity?
Lower productivity will lead to potentially perceived laziness in the workforce. Rather, low productivity refers to working inefficiently and failing to use your time and energy wisely to complete a task. An example of low productivity would be an employee spending two hours answering emails instead of delivering the organisation’s key services to a client.
To measure productivity, you can use the following equation:
Productivity = total output/total input.
What Causes Low Productivity?
Lower productivity can stem from external and internal problems; for example, an employee’s stressful home life, or a disorganised work environment. You will struggle to solve the problem of low productivity overnight, yet a good place to start is to examine the root causes. The following are several causes of low productivity:
Lower productivity will lead to: Poor Management
Lower productivity will lead to micromanagement, lack of communication, and weak leadership take their toll on any business’s workforce, impeding productivity and business success. How can employees produce excellent work (and consistently) if the people leading them are inefficient or overbearing?
Lower productivity will lead to: Disorganised Processes
Lower productivity will lead to a chaotic work experience. Chaos is a breeding ground for stress, overwhelm, and low productivity. If your business’s processes are disorganised, you risk missing deadlines, delivering subpar work, frustrating your team and customers, and failing to protect your company from any internal or external issues that may arise.
Your business will suffer from low productivity if you run it like a hobby without proper structure.
Lower productivity will lead to: Stressed Employees
Did you know that stress, anxiety, and depression cost the global economy around $1 trillion in lost productivity? This report comes from the American Institute Of Stress and paints a bleak, painfully honest picture of employees and businesses suffering.
When employees are stressed and overwhelmed, it damages their job performance, fuels lower productivity, consequently damaging the business’s output, profits, and much more.
Lower Productivity Can Impact: Employee Training
Lack of knowledge and expertise will stunt your business’s growth. It takes a less experienced person longer to do a job effectively compared to someone who’s an expert in that field, and if you have a team of inexperienced people, your business will suffer.
Outsourcing skills and services can be beneficial when investing in your business growth. The training of your internal teams can negatively affect your company’s training costs due to employee turnover.
If you delegate activities to a company like solverASSIST, you will have continuous access to experts to assist you in growing your business while focusing on important internal tasks, reducing costs and providing you with peace of mind that your business will run smoothly and efficiently.
Outdated Technologies Can Cause Lower Productivity
Do your employees still use Excel spreadsheets and rely on manual processes to complete their day-to-day tasks? Are you trying to manage processes over emails instead of software? This contributes to lower productivity within your business. . Innovative software and technology solutions can take care of tedious tasks, freeing up your team to deliver the business’s core services.
However, technology is constantly changing. As a business leader, you must ensure your team can access it. An outdated Windows laptop or software riddled with problems that the customer support team still hasn't fixed wastes time and money for your business.
Ensure software and technology are updated and utilised to avoid these issues. This will give you a competitive advantage in the industry and decrease lower productivity effects within your organisation.
Lower productivity may lead to: Distractions and Multitasking.
Did you know unproductive activities cost businesses over $37 billion annually? Unnecessary meetings, conversations between co-workers, and even multi-tasking are all examples of activities that distract employees, contributing to lower productivity within the workplace.
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What Are the Effects of Low Productivity on Your Business?
Lower productivity does not solely impact your internal processes and staff. It will soon extend to your clients and damage your business’s reputation and ability to compete with others in your industry. The following are two significant negative effects of low productivity on your business:
- Lower productivity will lead to reduced profit. Loss of profit is the greatest downside to low productivity. Suppose your team isn't operating efficiently or is occupied with less important tasks that still need completing. In that case, your organisation won’t have the capacity or capability to scale and bring in more revenue.
Likewise, you could lose money from failing to utilise resources wisely. You want to guarantee that you are utilising your team's skills, delivering work to the best of their ability, and effectively using the company’s resources - i.e. equipment and time.
- Lower productivity will lead to low morale and high employee turnover. Low morale leads to low productivity, as your employees lose the incentive to work. Likewise, low productivity breeds low morale. It becomes a difficult cycle to stop. In addition, if employees are unhappy, they might resort to drastic measures - for example, looking elsewhere for a job.
If your organisation struggles with high employee turnover, low productivity will be one of the unfortunate outcomes.
Every-Day Signs of Low Productivity
You must remediate the low productivity problem before it impacts your clients and business’s reputation and growth. You need to identify the signs. The following are often indicative of low productivity:
- Poor time management.
- Lack of creativity.
- Reliance on manual methods of completing tasks.
- Lack of control over tasks and responsibilities.
- Delays in projects. Are deadlines constantly shifting?
- Recurring bottlenecks.
- Consistently exceeding budget.
Is It Time to Start Outsourcing?
As you consider the drawbacks lower productivity produces within your organisation’s, you may think it is time to decide on the way forward and if it is now time to start outsourcing.
Ask yourself the following questions:
- Is my team burnt out, and is morale at an all-time low?
- Is my team struggling to meet deadlines? Have there already been examples of delays and missed deadlines that negatively impacted the business?
- Is my team spending most of their time on boring, non-core tasks instead of providing the organisation’s core services?
- You don’t have the resources and expertise to scale and keep up with demand.
- Your organisation is operating on a shrinking budget.
- Your customer service is suffering, and you’re unsatisfied with the experience you’re offering customers.
- You can’t keep up with your competitors, who are growing and utilising innovative new tools that allow them to streamline efficiency.
- New technologies promise to make your job easier, but you don’t have the money or the expertise to harness those technologies effectively. Thus, your business gets left behind as other organisations adopt it for the future.
At solverASSIST, we empower you to transform your company by dramatically improving revenue, combating lower productivity effects through our services, reducing costs, and improving processes through technology and automation for better customer service and experiences.
Let us help you boost your productivity through outsourcing today