As you employ new workers, you’ll need to be putting more of your budget toward payroll costs, making the ROI of your workforce a critical factor in determining profitability and growth. In theory, as you put more of your budget toward payroll costs, your business should begin producing more and accruing higher levels of revenue. Unfortunately, that’s often very far from what actually occurs when you beef up your payroll budget.
Employing workers isn’t enough to achieve high returns on your investments in your business. To do that, you need to reach operations excellence – the stage at which your employees are working to the very best of their ability on a daily basis. Every dollar in revenue earned by a business can be immediately devalued if its workers are doing their jobs inefficiently, making process improvement a top priority for any manager.
Listed below are a number of productivity solutions that, if employed correctly, can help the workers at your office produce results more efficiently. As a leader, you need to give your employees the tools necessary to reach their full potential. The below-listed strategies can allow you to do so – and to earn a higher-than-ever return on your investment in your people.
1. Investigate professional-level training programs
One way to get a better return on your payroll is to invest in additional skills for your workforce. No matter what industry you operate within, odds are your team of employees could benefit from additional training. After all – nobody’s perfect.
You may assume that adult education classes would be very costly for individuals, much less for your entire team. Yet if these classes give your workers the skills they need to produce more efficiently, then the return on your investment in the courses will come in no time. Better yet, your return on your investment in your employees will grow – and stay at a higher level for as long as they work for you.
2. Begin working with an off-site location that can assist your team
You can achieve greater productivity in another way, without having to send your employees off for extra training: by relieving them of menial time-consuming tasks. Delegating work to an off-site team, tasks that cost your employees valuable time, is a strategy businesses use to maximize ROI per employee.
It’s not about outsourcing – it’s about finding a strategy that allows your employees to work to the very best of their abilities. They can’t reach their full potential if a significant part of each day is wasted on work that doesn’t require their expertise, such as data entry. By finding a partner to assist them, you can put your organization one step closer to getting a full return on the investment in its employees.
3. Institute a quota system
Yet another way of earning a higher return on your investment in your employees is by instituting a quota system for their work. Such a system would ensure that each employee produce a specific amount of work or complete a certain amount of tasks in a given time. This strategy would allow a business to ensure that they’re getting a very controlled return on their investment – by determining ahead-of-time what each employee will be doing day-by-day and month-by-month.
Alternatively, your business could choose to begin using performance ratings for your employees. This system does not rely on specific milestones of production, but instead rates employees based on a number of different metrics, and then compares their ‘rating’ to company expectations.
“The metric of choice in most businesses today is performance ratings,” said Cy Wakeman, a Forbes contributor and best-selling author. “The intention is to show employees how they have measured up to expectations at work in the past year and focus their minds on their role in delivering on the organization’s goals.”
4. Put more money into employee wellness programs
There’s another oft-overlooked way of decreasing employee expenses: by increasing employee wellness. It’s a common known fact that well-rested and healthy employees will produce at a better level than tired ones. There is no commodity more valuable than good health – so influencing your team to keep themselves in top shape can help your business to produce more cleanly than ever before.
There are numerous ways to do so: you could expand your healthcare benefits, offer an on-site gym or wellness center, offer employees guidance on eating and sleeping properly, or devise any other strategy that you feel is appropriate for your workplace culture.
As in all the aforementioned tips-for-increased-productivity, the key to success is not a single specific strategy. The key, on the contrary, is to do everything possible – intersecting numerous strategies – to get the return-on-investment provided by your employees to its highest level possible.