You have hired the right staff, they have the experience and the skills but and they appear to be plodding along nicely. Things are going ok, everyone seems happy & when you walk into your office people smile and greet you as you would expect. But are your staff happy? Is everything really ok? And are you maximizing the true potential of your workforce?

These are the questions you should ask yourself when assessing your staff’s productivity. Even if business is good, it could always be better. Incentivizing your staff and improving your company culture could give you a competitive advantage in your field and help your business thrive!

Here are our 3 tips to increase the productivity of your staff.

Providing your staff with Extrinsic Incentives

An extrinsic incentive is an incentive that directly benefits an individual in the form of a reward. You are in a position to offer your staff external rewards. These rewards can be specific to each individual in the form of commission paid on sales or other kinds of measurable performance. You can also offer extrinsic incentives to those that perform the highest to get your staff members competing against each other for the reward. Something as small as a staff competition can boost the productivity of your workforce. While the majority of your staff will likely work harder directly to gain the extrinsic reward, many of us also crave recognition.

The competitive members of your workforce will ultimately want to prove themselves and get recognition for their hard work amongst both management and their peers. This brings us onto our second point, intrinsic motivation.

Intrinsic Motivation and Increasing levels of Autonomy

Giving your staff more autonomy provides them with more control over their work, having more control, means more responsibility. When someone has more responsibility and is personally involved in the decision-making process at work it can often trigger intrinsic motivation for that person. Those in very repetitive jobs are hard to intrinsically motivate but individuals whose work involves more complex tasks often improve their performance as their levels of Autonomy increase. Providing staff with more challenging but interesting tasks, allowing individuals to choose the tasks they partake in & allowing your staff to participate in the decision making the process of your business could all have a positive effect on your business.

Create a Strong Company Culture

Creating a strong company culture which is understood & respected can give you a competitive advantage. Whether you want your companies priority to be on creativity or quality you want the positive habits of your company culture evident at all levels of your business. Making sure every staff member in your business understands the goals, company vision, and ethics of your business is the most important step in creating your company culture. You must ensure that the staff you employ fit the bill! These individuals should share the qualities and in some cases beliefs of that, your company does. As a good starting point, You could use Sage People for your business in order to become a people company. This system will help you understand and manage your existing staff and ultimately help you to engage with them and deliver your company culture.