For any business, big or small, there is one aspect more important than any other: their employees. If your workers are happy and skilled, they will deliver in terms of productivity, and this will cause your business to grow.

The key point is the word “happy”. While having a motivated workforce will always be your intention, it’s not always that easy to keep every employee in a positive frame of mind. With that said, there are several methods you can implement to both improve happiness and productivity.

Read on for four tips on how you can boost the performance of your employees:

Monitor engagement and happiness

To gain a greater understanding of the productivity levels of your employees, you need to track their engagement and happiness levels. Because the happier that they are, the more productive they will be for your company.

To do this, you can incorporate an employee engagement survey – as provided by Inpulse.com – into your business operations. This survey allows you to track your workers and teams over time, with it providing an insight into their mood and behavior. It will then, ultimately, supply the knowledge of how to improve the work experience for employees. You could arrange for virtual team building activities for work while your team works remotely at home. Team building activities not only improve the team working capabilities of the employees, but also keep the team afloat by taking care of their mental health.

Set realistic targets

Pushing your employees is one thing, but you should never set unachievable goals. Instead, they must be given realistic targets to hit. To help with this, you will need to assess the overall quality of your workers. What are they good at? What do they struggle to do?

Along with providing attainable targets, offer suitable support for whenever it’s required. Additionally, give employees clear direction to help limit the possibility of them becoming stuck during a task. Introducing professional OKR software could also be a valuable tool that business owners may want to introduce, as if your employees have something to work toward, they will be able to stay on the task at hand. Alongside direction from their superiors, all of this will assist with them feeling comfortable and, ultimately, more productive.

Automate tasks

There are certain assignments that no employee looks forward to completing. They take time, and they’re monotonous. Time could be focused on other tasks etc. Thankfully, there is a magical solution: automation.

As technology continues to improve and evolve, so does the ability to automate tasks. There are many different software packages available that can automate everything from accounting to sending out emails. Not only does this save bundles of time, but it allows employees to focus on more important projects.

Reduce potential distractions

In this day and age, distractions are a given. Smartphones and social media mean people are constantly sidetracked from their work. Plus, that’s just one example.

As a result, it is helpful to implement a work philosophy that focuses on limiting distractions. Try and get employees to switch off their phones and avoid opening up time-killing websites on their desktops.

With that said, you should never push too far with this point. A complete no-phone policy or blocking websites will only cause resentment among your employees. To find a balance that works for all parties, you could go with regular breaks. They can check their phones and whatever else during these breaks, and it will leave them more productive when it comes to getting back to their desk.