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Saturday, March 30, 2013

7 Ways Managers Can Dramatically Boost Prodctivity For Themselves And Their Employees

1. Optimize Your Work Space  First,know that staring at cute images like puppies on your walls can narrow your focus and make you less error prone. Second,  boost your employee output by  trying  to keep desks away from windows since good weather is distracting. Third, crank up the heat since employees who work in warm offices make 44 %  fewer errors and increase their output 150%. Around 77 degrees is optimal. Fourth, filter out distractions since constant chitchat  and exposure to noise makes you less likely to persist at difficult tasks. Fifth, build a nap room. Studies show that napping anywhere from 6 to 90 minutes a day improves memory and learning ability. And last, choose power colors like red rooms to improve performance and blue room to enhance creativity.

2. Don't Reward Failure Your employees will work harder to avoid a loss than to seek a gain. So set targets, impose consequences for failure but don't set the stakes too high.

3.Don't Multitask  Studies at Stamford  have proven that multitasking doesn't work.So instead, dedicate a 20 minute chunk to a single task, and then switch to the next one. Also, limit the time you spend on emails since it has proven cause stress. So just check your emails a few scheduled times a day and turn off email notifications  the rest of the time. Also, quick questions are often better asked face to face or by phone where they don't add to the huge amounts of emails received everyday.

4.Exercise Studies show  that working out or doing aerobics improves your brain function.

5. Pay A Bigger Share Of Employees Health Insurance The University of Michigan and Harvard Medical did a study that shows for every $5 increase in health car costs incurred by employees, absences increase by one hour. The authors conclude that the higher the costs, the fewer prescriptions employees fill. So they experience more pain and miss more days of work. The bottom line is that employees with health insurance are far more productive than their uninsured peers.

6.Take Time To Get More Rest You'll find that you'll accomplish more if you give your body sufficient down time. Another Stamford study shows that when college basketball players got 10 hours of sleep a night, their shooting accuracy improved 9 percent.Also,  a lack of sleep affects your ability to control your emotions.   But sleep isn't the only thing you need.  Recent studies by the University of Utah and Kansas have shown that spending time in nature dramatically improves high-level cognition.Activities like hiking influences and improves creativity.

7.Encourage Healthy Conflicts Healthy debates yield better work outcomes since debating makes people divergent , it reduces conformity and fosters competition.  But watch out for brainstorming with the assertion that there's no such thing as a bad idea . It has proven to be lousy for productivity. Employee teams produce many more ideas when  they are encouraged to challenge each other in a debate setting. Just make sure you don't put all your A players on one team. That's because top performers usually don't work well as a team. This has been proven by the NBA and Wall Street analysts.When you have too many star players on one team, it promotes status conflicts within the team. So make sure your groups are not made up of  all leaders. You need some people who are prepared to defer.