Your employees are a valuable asset that requires a significant amount of investment after the initial hire. Sadly, many business owners and managers believe their duty is done after hiring and training. They totally overlook the importance of keeping up with their staff and assisting them in their further development and growth. As a result, they don’t achieve the income, retention, or overall success they desire. Consider the following tips you may take this year to help your employees succeed at work and avoid making the same mistakes.

1. Do Not Hesitate To Delegate

While this tip appears to be the most basic one, it is often the most difficult to put into practice. We understand that your company or team is your baby, and you want to be involved in everything that happens to it. While there’s nothing wrong with prioritizing quality (that is, after all, what makes a firm successful), doing everything yourself rather than delegating can waste everyone’s time. Instead, delegate assignments to qualified workers and trust that they will do them successfully. This allows your employees to obtain valuable skills and leadership experience that will benefit your firm in the long run.

2. Match Skills To Tasks

In order to enhance efficiency, it is essential to understand your employees’ skills and behavioral characteristics.
Expecting your personnel to be exceptional at everything is inefficient; instead, ask yourself, “Is this the best qualified individual to do this assignment?” before giving them a task to complete. If that isn’t the case, look for someone else whose skills and personality are a suitable fit for the position.

3. Effective Communication

Every leader knows that effective communication is essential for productive employees  With the advancement of technology, we can now communicate with one another with the touch of a button (or  touch screen). Isn’t this to suggest that current communication systems are as good as they get? Certainly not. The email was shown to be the second most time-consuming activity for employees (after their job-specific tasks).

Instead of relying just on email, try social networking sites (such as Slack) for even faster team communication. You can also encourage your employees to use a more archaic type of communication, like voice-to-voice communication sometimes.

A simple meeting or phone call can resolve a problem that would otherwise take hours of back-and-forth email communications.

4. Maintain Clear And Focused Goals

You can’t expect people to be productive unless they have a clear goal in mind. Make sure that the duties assigned to staff are as defined and constrained as possible.

Tell them exactly what you expect of them and how this task will influence them. One method to achieve this is to make sure your goals are “SMART” — specified, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely. If not, think about how you could adjust the task to help your employees succeed and stay focused.

5. Provide Incentives To Employees

Giving employees a cause to be more productive is one of the most effective methods to motivate them.
When deciding how to thank employees for their outstanding efforts, make sure to take into account their individual needs or preferences. One employee, for instance, may value public praise while another prefers a private “thank you”. There are a few incentives you might use in addition to simple words of gratitude:

• Instead of a bonus or promotion, you can give your employees paid time off (PTO) without requiring them to utilize vacation or sick time.
• Take Them Out to Lunch, Dinner, or Happy Hour: You can take the team out to lunch, dinner, or happy hour, or a gift card if you’re working remotely.
• Send a Handwritten Note: This demonstrates that you appreciate your employees’ hard work and that you care enough to take the time to thank them.
• “Lazy Monday”: Use a “Lazy Monday” coupon, which permits staff to arrive late on Monday mornings.
• CC Your Boss in Emails: Consider copying YOUR manager on an email acknowledging the team or a team member for their efforts. 
• Try a Wellness Program: To lower the number of sick days and your company’s overall health insurance costs, consider adopting a workplace wellness program.

6. Trim Away Any Excess.

When staff is focused on a greater goal, avoid giving them lesser, irrelevant assignments if at all possible. Evaluate the team’s daily routine to see if there is anything that can be eliminated to allow staff to focus on higher-priority tasks.

Consider lowering the word count requirement if employees want to make daily reports for their superiors as supervisors don’t always have time to read them. Doing anything just for formality is a waste of time that may be better spent on achieving goals that will benefit your company.

7. Employee Development And Training

Reducing or eliminating training may appear to be a beneficial method for the firm to save time and money (learning on the job is said to be an effective way to train, after all). However, this could harm in the long run. Forcing people to learn about their jobs only while working can be inefficient.

So, rather than having workers aimlessly try to complete a task with no assistance, spend an extra day teaching them the abilities they’ll need to do their job. This way, they can get on with their work on their own, and you won’t have to waste time afterward answering simple queries or correcting mistakes.

Encourage employees to continue their self-development once they have completed their initial training. Providing assistance in the development of new skills will result in a lot more experienced staff, which will benefit your company in the long run. Individual coaching, workshops, courses, mentoring, or just increasing their responsibilities are all examples of ways to help employees grow. Employees will gain extra abilities as a result of these possibilities, allowing them to increase their efficiency and productivity.

8. Make Telecommuting A Habit

Allowing your workers to work from home may appear unproductive; after all, how can you be sure they’ll be productive if no one is watching? On the other hand, the truth is quite the opposite. Studies show that employees who work from home are more productive than office employees). Allowing your employees to work from home saves them time that would otherwise be spent doing anything else.

For instance, an employee is too unwell to come to work (or is concerned about infecting their coworkers), but they can still be productive. If you do not allow them to work from home, they will be forced to take a sick day and miss work. Nevertheless, requiring your employee to skip an entire day of work if they have a little problem to fix at home which takes 2 to 4 hours is inefficient. Allow your employee to work from home so that they maximize the time they do have available.

9. Give Feedback To One Another

There’s no way for employees to succeed if they don’t even realize they’re being unproductive. This is why performance reviews are so important: assess your employees’ performance and then meet with them individually to let them know where they succeed and where they need to improve.

When you want to help employees succeed, it’s not just about what they can do better; you too have a role to play. When you’ve reviewed your employees’ performance, inquire as to what you may do to assist them more effectively.

Perhaps they’d like a bit more direction on specific jobs, or they’d like a little more creative freedom. Asking for input not only provides you with concrete, immediate ways to help your staff improve, but also fosters a culture of open communication that will enable long-term growth.

10. Consider The Big Picture

Things that may appear to you to be a waste of time right now may turn out to be beneficial in the long run. So, before you oppose a seeming waste of time, consider how it can assist your company.

HR software can save your company – and your employees – many hours in the long run. Embracing HRIS technology will enhance productivity, minimize frustration, and help your organization grow, from automated onboarding to payroll that runs autonomously.

You can avoid falling behind and put that extra hour to good, productive use by following a few of our ideas to help you employees succeed.

Final Note

You don’t have to spend a lot of money to help your employees succeed at work (although few employees will reject your efforts to enhance compensation packages). By following the above-mentioned steps, you, your managers, and your staff will be in a better position to be more successful than ever in the upcoming year.