Updated June 2, 2023
Workplace Effectiveness
Workplace effectiveness refers to how an organization, team, or individual can best achieve their goals and objectives while using available resources. It encompasses various factors, such as productivity, quality of work, efficiency, innovation, communication, collaboration, adaptability, and overall performance.
An effective workplace is one where employees are motivated, engaged, and empowered to do their best. This involves providing them with the necessary tools, resources, and support to succeed and creating a positive work culture that values teamwork, open communication, and continuous learning.
By regularly evaluating and improving workplace effectiveness, organizations can stay competitive, meet the evolving needs of their customers, and drive sustainable growth.
Essential Workplace Effectiveness Skills
There are various types and skills to focus on at the workplace mentioned below.
1. Time Management to Boost Workplace Effectiveness
You might think that you are good at time management decisions and the time you spend on your tasks. However, studies suggest that only 17% of people can exactly measure the time they take to finish tasks. Time also depends on the nature of the work and individual capacity.
Analyze the project you are working on and set a time, say two hours. Note it down on the paper. When you have selected a target and have decided to finish the task within the time, nothing can stop you from achieving it. While working, you can also face many distractions, but nothing can distract you if you have focused your mind. Alexander Graham Bell‘s said, “Concentrate all your thoughts on the work at hand. The sun’s rays do not burn until brought to focus,” which is quite applicable here. Concentrate on the tasks you are doing by hand.
You can use tools like Rescue Team to help set your schedule and get a gist of the exact time you can spend on the daily tasks.
Follow these strategically oriented action plans in your time management spectrum for workplace effectiveness.
2. Prioritize Tasks to Boost Workplace Effectiveness
Sort out the tasks that are urgent, important, and non-urgent. Start with the critical tasks first; it is not necessary that you give more attention to the urgent ones, but it is imperative that you prioritize these tasks and finish them off soon. Yes, important tasks have to get maximum attention. Of course, you can keep the least important tasks on a pending list. Segregating between what is urgent and unimportant is crucial to prioritize time and workload.
3. Cleanliness to Boost Workplace Effectiveness
For many of us, clutter does not bother us much, but it is distracting and distressing. Notice how much time you waste searching for a useful object or a file if everything is cluttered. And how disgusting it would become if you want to go for a meeting and cannot find the file. Tidying can be both self-elevating and motivating, and it would be very easy for you to stay on top of things if your workspace is neat.
4. Pick Momentum to Boost Workplace Effectiveness
While working, you feel tired or find a particular task taking longer than expected. Leave it for a while. Start with an easy task that will keep your mind fresh. Get up from your desk and take a ten-minute break. Taking breaks in between will increase your concentration. Some studies have found that short breaks can help you achieve your target faster.
5. Avoid Multi-tasking to Boost Workplace Effectiveness
We say we should do multi-tasking in this fastest world, but as humans, we should avoid this. We should focus on completing the first task and then start with the other projects. If you have different activities to perform, list them under various categories and take up those tasks first which are similar in nature.
6. Ensure Tranquility to Boost Workplace Effectiveness
The most important thing is to keep your mood composed and calm even in tense environments. People might feel overwhelmed by too many tasks, which could be very stressful. Take a practical approach and only take those tasks you can comfortably and perfectly do. Take a little pause, prioritize your chores, and you will see you are moving stealthily to achieve ultimate career goals.
7. Brainstorm to Boost Workplace Effectiveness
Brainstorming is an amazing way to get a wide range of options in the shortest possible time. To save time, you can use the whiteboard to convey your ideas to your team and get their suggestions and inputs, or you can also mass mail ideas to the whole team. When you incorporate the group’s ideas, you could effectively increase your potentiality without adding extra hours.
In brainstorming, you prepare an action plan:
- Explaining and agreeing on the different aims and objectives
- Framing a time limit
- Categorizing each idea
- Making an assessment and analysis of each
- Looking into other options and prioritizing the same
- Planning the schedule and chalk out controlling and follow-up methods
You can also personally brainstorm your ideas. Taking time for brainstorming can get you a good head start in your work. You can list or jot down all the views on paper. By doing this, you can come up with many other possibilities which you might not have thought of before but might be fruitful and practical. Personal brainstorming gets you more ideas than speculated group brainstorming. This happens as groups cannot always strictly follow the brainstorming rules and often get distracted, and their ideas get blocked. And with personal brainstorming, you can be more free and creative. For instance, a statement you initially hesitated to develop in a group can generate something special.
The idea of brainstorming is suggested by Robin Barrow, “Brainstorming in a sense is based on the idea that a situation in which one’s suggestion has to meet certain standards of quality and get criticized and likely to inhibit people, and that having certain set of general idea in ways in which one might modify a proposal may help one to achieve modification”. Whether you are into personal brainstorming sessions or doing it in a group, the idea is to have it targeted to one particular topic. It should help in making any analysis of the decision-making process but only to analyze and judge the thoughts.
8. Synergize to Boost Workplace Effectiveness
In the brainstorming session, we have to play our cards well if we think out of the box. If we are in a managerial position, our responsibility is to accept many different perceptions like restrictions or limitations, if any. And any idea generated has to be looked into from conditions prevailing in the market and industry, like the quality of the products or services, generation of sales, price changes, and other regulatory practices.
9. Tier Rank Activities to Boost Workplace Effectiveness
Studies have shown that reaching broad goals at the beginning stage of a career might deteriorate proficiency level. So the best strategy is to climb on a ladder step by step. Gauge yourself in the lower area first and then climb up as you continue to master the skills. As said by Hammond, “Be a champion of small things that make a big difference before you are a champion of big things that make a big difference.”
Do the following action-oriented steps to become a champion of workplace effectiveness
- Keep your workspace well organized
- Seek feedback on the work performance
- Get workplace effectiveness professional training
- Plan your work to gain efficiency
- Be always ready for a change in workplace effectiveness
- Follow the policy, procedures, and instructions that might apply in your job in your workspace.
What else can you do for workplace effectiveness?
- Devote some time to show your creative side of you.
- Work offsite when requires
- Switch off all the popup notifications
- Believe in verbal conversations instead of emailing
10. Do Not Overcommit to Boost Workplace Effectiveness
Generally, people over-commit, thinking anything is achievable, forgetting the many limitations, interruptions, or emergencies. It is also possible that the work they have committed to doing is also beyond their capability.
Suppose you have a task that can take you one hour to complete. Schedule it for an hour and 25 minutes for the job. If you face interruptions, you can tackle them in 25 minutes and still be on time with your work.
However, if you have committed something, do it. Be mentally strong, truly committed to completing the task, and accept any challenge, but the challenge should be within your capacity or limit. It is about making your life filled with goals and killing the rest.
Follow these two steps to meet commitments:
- Be committed and focused
Approach your goals with what is popularly said to be a sense of conviction. If you cannot do any task, doing wrong or not doing it after commitment can give you dejection. You are bound to get distracted even by minor things if you lack concentration and dedication. But at the same time, they also learn to say” No,” which is also a part of the conviction.
- Just Get Started
Even though you are still determining whether you can reach your goal, start if you are willing and committed to achieving it. Even though the journey is hard, and you have several bottlenecks to face but get going.
11. Work on Stress Levels to Boost Workplace Effectiveness
Stress has become a crucial part of our functioning, that we tend to ignore it until it becomes unbearable. A bit of pressure and mental stress is a motivating things. Still, when stress exceeds the limit, we lose our capability to adjust to it, resulting in decreased productivity. Right from the start of your day until the end, controlling and managing your stress is what you should learn. If you feel overburdened and pressured, leave work for a while, take a few minutes, go for a walk, and do some relaxing things.
Proven Ways for Workplace Effectiveness
Following are the fully proven ways:
1. Eight Hours of Sleep
Even though you have a lot of work to do, sleeping is equally important, as it is good for your health and rejuvenates you when you wake up.
2. Keep a Stress Diary
Maintain a stress diary for a week or two to understand what triggers your stress which could help you identify the events that cause stress and understand the degree to which you are experiencing it.
3. Exercise and Morning Walk
A morning walk is a must for each one of us and exercises. Give half an hour for a morning walk and rest half an hour to exercise. It would keep you fresh the whole day.
4. Do breathing exercises
When you feel stressed, breathe in and out for a few minutes. Yoga advocates breathing exercise, which not only reduces stress but depression and any kind of mental problems and also improves overall health. After a few minutes of breathing exercises, you will feel highly elevated. You can do breathing exercises any time of the day and at any moment. When you are working, and you feel tired, start doing breathing exercises. You would feel relaxed.
Every day would be like a challenge to tap the unlimited potentials of your life, but how you move ahead depends on you. So get going.
Conclusion
We have eight hours to spend in the workplace and a few hours to redeem our personal life, so the biggest challenge is to utilize those hours to increase workplace effectiveness productively. It means making some articulately fruitful moves through smarter ways and shedding off the habits that deter us from being productive in our work.
