Fading are the days of working from home in your pajamas. Making the transition back to the office might be easy for some and difficult for others, but with these easy productivity tips, you’ll be well on your way to getting back to the norm.
Keep reading for productivity tips.
Easy Productivity Tips for Being Back In the Office (and out of those pajamas)
You might be thinking that you are just starting to get workers back into the office. Many of your employees are happy to be back. Not everyone is cut out for working from home. Not every home is cut out for being the center of work.
To work well from home, one needs a bespoke space for a desk, ergonomic chair, and privacy. There also needs to be some kind of secure space where the work computer can live and sensitive client information can be safe from accidents and away from prying eyes.
If your home did not provide any of those things, you are likely one of the people happy to be back in the office. But are you as productive as before? These productivity tips can get your team out of the office again and keep them motivated.
Of course, there are other ways to get out of the office and good reasons to do it more often. If you have a reasonably large company, the pressure you put on the power grid is likely quite high. You also depend on the power grid to do business.
This is where solutions like demand management come in. Did you know that anywhere between 1 to 5 hours can determine 10 to 25% of your energy costs? How you manage those costs is often the difference between a profitable and unprofitable quarter.
Do your research and make the right call. Part of the right call is just getting everyone out of the office from time to time. Here are a few interesting productivity tips that will jumpstart your business.
Sponsor a Work Retreat
One of my favorite and most powerful productivity tips is to sponsor a work retreat. Work retreats are fun, reinvigorating, and exclusively for the wealthiest and most talented people in the company.
That leaves a lot of good people out who never go on a work retreat, who never get reinvigorated, and who never get the special training that makes them more talented. With the savings you gain from demand management and other measures, you can afford to send even more people on those work retreats.
Companies have been sending top performers to retreats that happen to be paradise in the Riviera Maya Disney World and Hawaii. They are really just vacations for the people who can most afford to pay for their own vacations every year.
The majority of work gets done by those people barely getting by. It doesn’t have to be this way. Find affordable and equitable ways to get more people out of the office on much-needed retreats and you will not only save money on energy, but you will also gain a more enthusiastic workforce.
Make Remote Work Available
This is one move from the pandemic that I think should stay as it’s a proven productivity tip for many.
Before the pandemic, managers were dead set against remote work. The idea of a manager is a joke in some businesses. It is more of a joke if there is no one present in an office to manage.
Their jobs literally depended on them being in an office overseeing the work of other people in that office. Productivity is not deterred by remote work. In fact, remote work has been found to boost productivity overall.
People take shorter breaks. And sick days are all but eliminated. Office politics disappear. And the dress code is always casual Friday or less. A bad hair day is irrelevant. And people who have trouble with mobility or transportation are not disenfranchised.
The best part about allowing people to work from home is that fewer people are occupying office space. With fewer people in the office at any given time, you can save money by having a smaller office space. It is a win-win all around.
Create Outdoor Spaces
If your office is not near a park, create a park-like environment on a part of the property so that workers can enjoy green spaces on warm days. Allow them to check out laptops so they can do their work from the gazebo for part of the day.
If they have a nice place to enjoy their lunch outside, they will be less likely to get in the car and leave during the day. Let them get up and stretch their legs outside and they will be less likely to go home when they are feeling tired.
Short Day Rewards
The final suggestion for these productivity tips is to offer short-day rewards. Many sales teams offer short workday spiffs for hitting sales targets early.
This incentivizes heavy productivity at the front end of the workday and more goals set overall. Hitting a high sales goal allows a person to go home at 2 p.m. instead of 5 p.m.
That sort of incentive really moves the productivity needle. You can also schedule your occasional team-building meetings for the last 2 hours of the workday. That might happen once a month and would mean a lot to the people in your employ.
You will find that with such incentives, you are not losing time, but gaining productivity and worker goodwill.
Final Thoughts
There are many good ways to get people out of the office. More importantly, though, there are many good reasons to do so, too — and the most affordable reasons are for retreat, remote work, and restoration of energy and focus.
Getting people out of the office helps productivity and hopefully, these productivity tips will help you.
