by Paul Lines

Created on: June 16, 2012   Last Updated: August 14, 2012

The productivity of an individual in the workplace is perhaps the key driver for business success, and this applies whether the individual is an employee or running his/her own business. It follows that lack of productivity can lead to business failure or loss of employment. The question that persists as a result of this issue is how do individuals increase their levels of productivity on a daily basis. As will be shown in the following discussion, this is not as difficult at it may seem. Indeed, in the view of the author, there are three main steps to improving individual productivity.

Focus

Within a work environment, the tasks and duties that a worker is required to perform have to remain his or her centre of attention during the time spent in the workplace. While this does not mean that one should ignore other work colleagues or events that are occurring at a place of work, it is important not to allow other distractions to interrupt the execution and completion of those tasks unnecessarily. It has to be recognised that if one is in the middle of a task and are distracted from this, returning to the task will require additional time spent picking up from where the task was left off. The more critical the task being undertaken, the more costly in terms of productivity will be the interruption. Eliminating what could be perceived as wasted time spent in this way is likely to improve the individual’s productivity level for the day.

Innovation

There has been a considerable amount of academic literature published about the term ‘innovation’, which tends to suggest it is a complex issue. However, in simple terms innovation is about making improvements to processes that already exist or finding better ways of performing those tasks. It will be apparent that improvements of this nature, when made by an individual worker, are likely to lead to increased productivity. For example, if ones duties include sending out letters to customers where, apart from personal details, these contain the same basic information, developing templates where key customer information is the only element that needs to be changed will be a lot quicker than re-typing the same letter. This improvement will increase the employee’s productivity by increasing the time he or she has to devote to other tasks.

Energy

Connecting energy to increased productivity may seem an odd association. Nonetheless, it is well known that in whatever task we perform we are at our best when

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