As a business owner, it is your sole responsibility to inspire employees to give their very best all the time. Howbeit, forcing productivity by getting into a tug of war with your employees can be counter-productive. Hence, it behoves you as a leader to be tactical about how you go about pushing your employees to be productive. In this article, we have compiled 7 strategies that can help you boost the productivity of your employees.

1. Training: it is totally understandable that one cannot give what one does not have. Going by this fact, it is essential that you “sharpen the saw” in terms of your employees’ capacities. In truth, training your employees is as advantageous to you as an employer, as it is to the employee who was trained. Availing your employees the opportunity to learn skills like working with spreadsheet, doing business presentations or developing business plans would be of immense benefits to your organization.
    
2. Employee Recognition: another effective way to drive your employees to become more productive is by recognizing the efforts they put into their work. Recognizing and applauding the outstanding performance of your employees would give a boost to their morale. Employee recognition rewards may include announcements, gifts and/or awards ceremonies.
    
3. Performance Incentives: this is perhaps the most effective way of motivating employees to remain productive. The efficacy of this system lies in the fact that pay is directly proportional to performance. For instance, during the reign of Napoleon Bonaparte, he ruler promised 12,000 francs to anyone who found a way to preserve food for the army. This method of incentive birthed the emergence of canning food – which is now very conventional. As a matter of fact, the majority of Fortune 1000 use incentives to motivate their staff. Research has proven that adopt performance incentives systems tend to attain higher levels of productivity, and ultimately, profits.
    
4. Employee Engagement: employee engagement is a system whereby employees are driven, to the extent that they become very passionate about their responsibilities within the organization. At this point, employees get to have a sense of ownership and take discretionary measures within the scope of their work. By all standards, employee engagement has been proven to improve productivity.
    
5. Regular Performance Feedbacks: every organization has its standards in terms of performance expectations. But rather than whining over the fact that an employee isn’t at par with his/her deliverables; giving and taking performance feedback to and from employees would help to identify where there are gaps within the operations space.

For instance, imagine a car dealership whose standard is for every employee to achieve 10 sales per month. With these standards, it is easy to detect which employee isn’t meeting up with their target. However, the employee who isn’t meeting up could be struggling simply because he/she doesn’t get featured during the prime sales periods. With regular performance feedbacks, it becomes easy to detect where there are gaps within the work flow.

1. Workplace Flexibility: since the occurrence of the Covid-19 pandemic, the idea of workplace flexibility has become more pronounced than it was a couple of years ago. Nowadays, providing workplace flexibility for your employees is as essential for health and safety, as it is for improving productivity. It is imperative to respect individual differences, especially in terms of approach to work. Hence, it behoves you as an employer to avail your employees the luxury of completing their deliverables while working at their own convenience.
    
2. Milestone Celebration: celebrating milestones with your employees is a sure way to get to their hearts. Whether it is a birthday, an anniversary, a wedding ceremony, or any other remarkable event; as long as it is important to your employee, showing them that you care would certainly make them happy.

It is worthy of note that there is no laid out proportion or extent to how these strategies can be adopted. Howbeit, it beckons on you as an employer to tailor these strategies to suit the peculiar needs of your organization.