Leading Employees to Stay Focused and Productive

Joseph Stubblebine
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Teaching employees how to stay focused at work can be one of the hardest parts of being a manager. Other tasks—training sessions, seasonal reports, and enormous mail merge projects, for example—seem relatively easy when you compare them to apparently far-fetched productivity goals. Thankfully, modern technology, combined with a few innovative tips, can help you keep your employees on task.

Employee productivity can be difficult to engender without a viable action plan. As a manager, it's part of your job to achieve a range of goals on a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly basis. Sometimes, sales goals overlap with standards goals, which overlap with a visit from the corporate office, a county inspection, and a routine maintenance issue. Under these circumstances, employee productivity can be tough to maintain.

When considering how to stay focused at work, it's important to remember that your team is made up of an array of people who come from different backgrounds and have variable communication methods. One person won't respond to encouragement in the same way as another, so it's important to get to know your team. If you manage a small group of people, you may be able to help each member learn how to stay focused at work on an individual basis. If you take care of an entire department, however, you might need to divide employees with similar characteristics into groups and conduct separate training sessions.

Technology can help you—and your team—learn how to stay focused at work. App-based organizers have become very popular in recent years, not only because of their convenient input options but also because many can be set up to sync across a slew of devices, including tablets, smartphones, and computers. You simply enter goals, meetings, and other engagements into the app on one device and let it populate through. Then, set reminders on your phone or on the laptop at home.

There's another way that app-based organizer systems teach you how to stay focused at work: you can create a calendar and share it with other members of your team. This way, your entire crew has access to a shared system, so you can create goals and monitor progress as a team.

Leaning how to stay focused at work is a gradual process and not an overnight thing. If you wish to train your employees, you need to lead by example and ensure they view you with respect.

 

 

(Photo courtesy of Freedigitalphotos.net)

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