Employee productivity is the key factor that ultimately determines how much return you'll see on the investment in company workers. Unproductive employees create a consistent drain on business funds, while a highly productive worker will give your bottom line a boost. Try the following tactics to encourage engagement, innovation, and efficiency among your employees.

Employee training shouldn't be a one-time event that you address only with new hires. Provide ongoing training opportunities focused on areas where your efficiency isn't what it should be. Always offer extensive training when you implement new products or solutions. Utilization is critical to get the most out of advanced software solutions such as Sage Enterprise Management (Sage X3). Although Sage X3 is an incredibly powerful and highly customizable business solution, much of the functionality is lost if employees never learn to fully use the system's capabilities.

Focus on Strategic Management

Encourage managers to use strategic management rather than operational management, particularly at higher levels of the organization. Micromanaging an employee's daily activity ultimately reduces productivity by limiting the worker's ability to operate independently. Autonomy is particularly important in jobs that require innovation, creativity, and problem solving. Stepping back will give employees room to become the type of self-starters that you ultimately want in your company.

Provide the Right Tools

Equip your employees for better productivity by providing them with the necessary tools to do their jobs as efficiently as possible. Examine your current workflow carefully and look for bottlenecks, areas of redundancy, and delays. 

Is decision making slowed by inefficient information gathering? Implement a tool such as Sage Enterprise Intelligence that makes analysis and reporting tools accessible across all departments. Enable decision makers to generate the necessary data on their own so that individuals can move forward quickly and confidently with the right information at hand.

Promote Employee Health

Stress and illness can cause productivity to plummet. Emphasize self-care in the workplace. Offer access to health-sustaining resources such as an on-site gym, yoga studio, walking track, or meditation room. Make sure your vending machines are stocked with as many healthy choices as there are options for soda and chips. Bring indoor plants to the office to help clean the air and create a more aesthetically pleasing space. Simply adding plants to the workspace has been shown to increase productivity by 15 percent.

Refocus Employee Communications

According to CRM Learning, 80 percent of work-related conversation focuses on problems of the past. Employees spend the majority of their time re-evaluating prior issues and assigning blame for what's already happened. Only 15 percent of the conversation focuses on the present and only 5 percent looks to the future. Flip these numbers and actively focus on the future while leaving past errors and grievances behind you where they belong.

Improving employee productivity will create a more profitable and satisfying environment. Your workers will enjoy a greater sense of accomplishment, while everyone in the company will have the opportunity to celebrate the successes you achieve with a more engaged and active workforce helping to boost the company's bottom line.