How to improve the productivity of your startup

As an entrepreneur, with an increase in the workforce at your company you might face productivity issues. Here are a few structural and tactical ways you can use to enhance the output of your startups:

Structural:

1. Define the Big Goal: It is very important for you to define what you want to achieve (given your ‘why’ factor) so that you can make a broader plan and break into actionable. Unless and until you are clear about the goal and path to achieve, your team is going to swing back and forth and won’t be able to achieve anything in the long term.
2. Define quantitative targets for teams and individuals: It’s a myth that few things can not be quantifiable. You are a genius, you can define all the targets into numbers and each of your teams and team members should have quantitative targets. For eg. If a consumer product brand does something to delight the users, the success of the campaign can be tied to various factors like how many people are mentioning your brand on social media and that can be tracked by various tools and can be given as target.
3. Increase engagement and collaboration between teams: With increasing strength of your company, the differences between different teams might increase which can hamper productivity. Everybody needs to understand the importance of other teams and appreciate individual work. A small effort on this at the company level can make a huge difference. You can try a lot of innovative engagement ways that can help increase productivity as well as interactions across teams. For eg. You can ask all your team members to give inputs/ideas for marketing/sales, the marketing team can help technical teams with sessions on how to improve communications, Finance can have sessions on how to manage your personal finances, etc.
4. Keep transparency: Productivity is directly related to an amount of trust and personal association one has with the company. Keeping transparency and clear communication with everyone helps to build that trust. To keep the transparency, communicate more to your employees on a regular basis and discuss the company’s overall growth, recent developments, and strategy going forward. Keep transparency in terms of promotions, salary hike, bonus and incentives with the employees ( at least on an individual level if you don’t have company-wide policies).

Tactical:

1. Give small incentives to all individuals: Giving difficult targets won’t solve the purpose if people ultimately cannot associate with their own benefit especially for non-mechanical jobs like marketing/sales/tech etc.
2. Give overtime benefits: For jobs which are more mechanical less creative like data-entry, give overtime benefits to employees. When you need a job of 2.3 persons, hiring a 3rd person is not that smart thing to do (given the work is not going to increase in 6/12 months horizon and this piece of work is not a bottleneck for your business). Rather give overtime benefits to existing 2 people. This will result in more employee satisfaction and delight. On the other hand, when 3 people will be doing work of 2.3 people, all 3 of them will be having extra time which will not give work satisfaction to your employees if they are ambitious in nature.
3. Appreciate top performers and highlight their key achievements in public. This will not just increase the enthusiasm level of the employees who performed well but also increase competitiveness among employees and others will also try to perform better.
4. Motivate teams to learn a small new thing every day: Motivate all the individuals to give 1 hour to small new things which will help them in their career and if needed provide support as well. This will build trust and emotionally connect between employees and the company. Connect one on one with teams and spend some non-work hours with them.

These are just food for thoughts. A company can do many other things that can touch employees at the emotional level and will increase productivity and loyalty in the long term.

Let me know if you have more ideas on this, I will include those in my post.

Stay Thoughtful, Stay Focused, Stay Productive :)