The business world nowadays seems obsessed with productivity. This obsession became prominent in the Covid pandemic era when managers who started running remote teams felt the urge to remind their employees to stay highly productive while working from home.
There’s nothing wrong with working hard to achieve set goals and succeed. But in working environments where employees feel they need to work more, faster, and be available to managers 24/7, their effectiveness and performance can suffer.
This happens because employees tend to neglect deep, meaningful work that leads to quality results to finish as many minor tasks as they muster and prove to their managers that they’re not slacking.
This false productivity delusion can run down employees’ performance, making them miss deadlines for significant projects while tackling routine and work-for-work tasks.
This is a scenario you’d want to prevent from happening to your company. Luckily, an advanced employee tracker can record every minute of your employees’ time, showing you how they distribute it between tasks and projects and apps and websites.
This insightful data can help you identify whether your employees are falsely productive. And here are the five signs of false productivity you should focus on.
Employees Prone to Reacting to Crisis
Some employees are intrigued by crises. And they feel urged to jump from one issue to another, suggesting possible solutions or simply adding to the drama. Employees who act as firefighters at work, constantly rushing to put out various fires are wasting the time they could otherwise dedicate to doing their actual job.
So what can you do about this?
First, separate significant issues from fabricated crises that distract employees from getting the job done. Then you can use employee tracking data to see what caused the crisis and make well-informed decisions about the following steps and those employees who need to be involved in the problem-solving process. By doing this, you’ll clear the air, encouraging other employees to focus on their workload.
Striving for Perfectionism
Striving for perfection is futile. Because no one and nothing is perfect. So if you have talented, hard-working employees who constantly fail to miss deadlines, try to find out whether they are victims of perfectionism.
Like multitasking, perfectionism was once believed to be a desirable feature in candidates’ resumes.
However, your employees won’t complete any of their tasks if they want their outcome to look perfect. Because they’ll constantly revisit and revise their work in progress thinking it’s not good enough. You can use employee monitoring data to see whether the tendency to deliver perfect results is ruining your employees’ productivity and performance.
Apart from harming productivity, perfectionism can affect employees’ well-being driving them to overwork and spend long hours at work, ignoring their essential needs.
So if employee tracking data shows that a specific worker has a considerable number of overtime hours without delivering expected results, check in on them to see whether they’re prone to perfectionism and offer much-needed support to overcome this false productivity issue.
Wanting to Have Everything Under Control All the Time
This characteristic is closely related to perfectionism, but it manifests itself differently.
Some of your employees may think that their neat Google Drive or email inbox will reflect their productivity. And so they’re spending hours sorting out and replying to emails or organizing their docs and sheets.
And while this sense of tidiness may make you feel relaxed and organized, it doesn’t add up to productivity. Quite contrary it’s using up the time you can otherwise spend on finishing a critical report or task.
There’s nothing wrong with being well organized. It can help you be more effective and collaborative if done moderately. But if you tend to spend hours tidying and organizing at work, you’ll fail to commit to finishing significant, creative tasks.
Not Asking for Help When Needed
Let’s face it, doing a job and advancing in it is a life-long learning process. Unfortunately, many employees striving to portray themselves as highly competent overachievers often fail to realize this.
These employees would spend hours searching for a way to overcome the roadblock themselves rather than involving their co-workers or managers in a problem-solving process. They may believe that they’re using this time productively, when, in fact, they aren’t.
Luckily, frequent feedback based on employee tracking data can help managers identify specific issues that affect employees’ performance and offer possible solutions on the spot. Asking for help isn’t a sign of weakness or incompetence. It can improve team communication and collaboration and offer valuable training and lessons. So you should practice continuous feedback, encouraging your employees to speak openly about work-related issues so that you can provide timely support and guidance.
Final Words
False productivity isn’t a new issue. But you might not have the right tools to identify it in all its shapes and extent. The entire situation can change in your favor once you start using the employee tracking system.
This advanced tool will help you identify false productivity signs and take decisive steps to eliminate them, helping your employees use their time more efficiently and reach set goals.