Employee uptime is important no matter what sector your business is in. After all, the more your employees are working, the better the turnaround for you. This drives your business, which creates your bottom line. And for you and your employees, that is what puts food on your tables.

Of course, while pay scale and the atmosphere of their working environment definitely contributes to how hard they work, there are other ways to keep them on task.

So how do you maximize your employees’ up time and keep them on task as much as possible? Use these three tips to ensure that your employees don’t get in their own way.

Maintain Equipment

One key way is to ensure that your employees have access to any equipment that they need to do their job. Someone whose job it is to draft letters and ensure emails are paid attention to isn’t much good without a working computer. Likewise, a forklift operator can’t move cargo around if his forklift is in the shop.

Proper maintenance is one way to ensure equipment doesn’t break down and cause down times. You can also make sure that all equipment with moving parts are coated with wear resistant compounds. This will reduce wear and tear and forestall downtime from replacing parts.

Proper Training

Another key to ensuring that your employees are working as much as possible is through education. This doesn’t mean you have to send all your workers back to college for post-graduate degrees; what it means is that you want to make sure they know how to use the equipment they’re working on.

Someone who constantly works with computers might benefit from an online class to teach them tricks about Excel or Word that they didn’t know before. People who work with heavier machinery can also benefit from making sure they are using the machines optimally. Machines are meant to enhance productivity, but without the proper training, they can actually hinder more than help.

Avoid Overworking

The third way to make sure your employees are working to their full potential is to make sure they aren’t working too much. A recent study showed that too much overtime can actually be a detriment to employee productivity.

In some industries, such as construction, working your employees for long hours to transition from job to job may seem lucrative on the surface.  However, as the long overtime hours starts to drag on, employee focus starts to wane, leading to downtime. This downtime can be as innocuous as someone forgetting where they saved a file or put a piece of needed equipment. It can also end up being as serious as a work-related accident when an employee isn’t paying close attention to the job at hand.

This doesn’t mean you should forgo overtime completely, especially when there’s a push to finish a vital project. It does mean that you should carefully monitor your employees for signs of fatigue and stress.

Takeaway

Keeping your employees on task can be a daunting task in itself sometimes. Maintaining a balance between keeping them motivated and keeping them happy seems like a tightrope walk, but it’s necessary to ensure that your business not only survives, but thrives as well.