68% of your employees may not want to be there.
According to Gallup, only 32% of employees are engaged in the American workplace. Worldwide, it’s even worse: 87% of employees are disengaged at significant levels.
The leaders and managers in your company clearly face an uphill climb to build more productive teams.
It would be easy for them to emphasize production results while overlooking overall employee satisfaction with his or her work. However, business researchers are finding direct correlations between employees’ rates of satisfaction and their overall productivity.
After leading a team of researchers investigating the correlation between employee happiness and production, Dr. Andrew Oswald of the University of Warwick noted:
“Companies like Google have invested more in employee support and employee satisfaction has risen as a result. For Google, it rose by 37%, they know what they are talking about. Under scientifically controlled conditions, making workers happier really pays off.”
According to Tower Perrin, “Companies with a low level of employee engagement have a 33 percent annual decline in operating income and an 11 percent annual decline in growth.”
Paying attention to people directly affects results and the bottom line for your company. Thus the most significant thing your leaders can do to be more productive is to develop the people they depend on to get things done.
Productivity Begins with People
Your leaders and managers can make their teams stand out by embracing these 4 keys to more productive teams. When leaders understand and act on them, the entire company will benefit:
1. Production Is Not Enough.
Leading a productive team is quite an accomplishment. Achieving goals can be rewarding. But there are higher levels of leadership than just getting work done efficiently and adding to the bottom line.
What’s better than excellence at your work and high productivity from your team? Developing people so that they can lead with you.
Great leaders measure themselves by what they get done through others. That requires developing people in a leadership culture.
2. People Are an Organization’s Most Appreciable Asset.Most of what an organization possesses goes down in value. Facilities deteriorate. Equipment becomes out of date. Supplies get used up.
What asset has the greatest potential for actually going up in value? People! But only if they are valued, challenged, and developed by someone capable of investing in them and helping them grow.
People don’t appreciate automatically or grow accidentally. Growth occurs only when it’s intentional. Leaders take their teams to the next level when they think beyond production to how they can help the individuals on your team improve themselves and tap into their potential.
3. Growing Leaders Is the Most Effective Way to Accomplish the Vision.How can your leaders make your organization better? Invest in the people who work in it.
Companies get better when their people get better. That’s why investing in people always gives a greater return to an organization.
Everything rises and falls on leadership. The more leaders an organization has, the greater its horsepower. The better leaders an organization has, the greater its potential.
Your managers cannot over invest in their people. Every time they increase the ability of a person in the organization, they increase the ability to fulfill the vision.
Everything gets better when good leaders lead the organization and create a positive, productive, work environment.
4. People Development Is the Greatest Fulfillment for a Leader.Few things in life are better than seeing people reach their potential. If leaders help people become bigger and better on the inside, eventually those employees will become greater on the outside.
People are like trees: give them what they need to grow on a continual basis for long enough, and they will grow from the inside out. And they will bear fruit.
Leaders have to help team members see fulfillment in their work. Sometimes that will require the difficult task of changing a negative environment into a positive one.
It’s one thing to be positive in a positive or neutral environment. It’s another to be an instrument of change in a negative environment. Yet, that is what lifting leaders try to do. Sometimes that requires a kind word, other times it takes a servant’s action, and occasionally it calls for creativity.
If you want to see teams in your company rise to the next level, encourage your leaders to see the potential of the people you’ve hired. Encourage your leaders to embrace these 4 keys to more productive teams to move your employees to the highest levels of productivity and satisfaction.
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