Focus-Enhancing Tips to Help Your Staff

A lot of people believe that focus is something strictly individual, which makes them completely underestimate the importance of one’s work environment on their performance. Fortunately, this is not the case and, as an entrepreneur, there’s so much that you can do in order to help your team outperform your expectations. Here are six tips.

1.      Planned breaks instead of interruptions

There are two principles that your staff needs to adhere to in order to achieve peak performance. First of all, breaks shouldn’t be optional, due to the fact that a lot of people choose to skip or ignore them. At the same time, you can’t risk interrupting your employees, especially those who are doing all the creative work in your office. Therefore, what you need to do is establish several mandatory breaks for all of your employees.

2.      Write down your daily goals

Having weekly, monthly and yearly goals is something that most offices have; however, what about daily goals? First of all, it’s by far the best if you could post your daily goals on a massive whiteboard somewhere in the middle of the office, or at least in a spot that is visible from every single workstation. Due to the fact that boosting your sales, conversions or traffic aren’t goals that can be tracked on a daily level, you would have to find some other metric to measure. We’re usually talking about performance and project progress.

3.      Providing adequate equipment

One more thing you should take into consideration is the impact that the equipment that you provide your team with may have on their productivity. Noise is an incredibly powerful distraction but fortunately, it can be mitigated with some advanced equipment. For instance, you can get quieter computers and printers for your office or even take it all one step further with silent peripherals like a high-end noise cancelling headset for some of your employees. If the budget allows it, you might even want to consider getting every single person in the office one. At the very least, you could think in the direction of getting some silent keyboards for your staff, as well.

4.      Identify troublemakers

There are some people who are loud, distracting and overall, cumbersome to work with. The problem is that these people may not be the ones who have a problem with productivity but their peers. In other words, they reduce the productivity of their colleagues while being able to deliver on all their tasks in time and in satisfactory quality. Also, these people are not always loud extroverts. In a lot of scenarios, we’re talking about emotional vampires. Identifying these people is just one of the challenges that you’ll face, seeing as how a lot of people in your employ won’t be comfortable pointing fingers. Sometimes, they won’t even be able to tell that it’s the person in question causing all this distress, seeing as how the aggression coming their way may not be direct but indirect and passive.

5.      Don’t ask your team to multitask

One of the biggest myths of the business world is the fact that multitasking makes one a dedicated and efficient employee. The truth, however, lies in the fact that multitasking reduces the productivity of your staff by a staggering 40 percent. At the end of the day, it just might seem as not working. Of course, a lot of your employees might still try to multitask, due to the fact that it’s in their nature. What you need to explain to them is that making fewer errors means a lot more than getting a job done more quickly.

6.      Keep the place neat

Another thing you need to understand is the fact that visual distractions cause a drop in productivity. This is why the place needs to be as neat as possible. For starters, you should let everyone know that their workstation is their own responsibility. Second, you need to find a reliable cleaning agency to outsource the maintenance to and hold them up to what was promised.

Conclusion

In the end, even though the focus should be a subjective thing, it’s more than clear that there’s so much you can do on this topic. Seeing as how each of these focus enhancers helps benefit work output and productivity and reduces the number of errors when it comes to the end product, it’s definitely something worth considering.