Nine Tips to Improve Workplace Efficiency

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Published: January 14th, 2025

When you consider what qualities make a successful business, you’ll probably think of risk-taking, strategic goal-setting, adaptability, and strong leaders supported by empowered employees. While these are all tenets of a successful business, we often overlook the role of workplace efficiency.  

Improving efficiency in the workplace allows us to achieve more with less. This can translate to increased production and profit margins and enable us to redirect our energies towards problem-solving or new business developments. Working efficiently won’t transform your business into an overnight success, but it is critical in enabling a robust business to capitalise on its successes.

What is Workplace Efficiency?

In a nutshell, workplace efficiency is about completing tasks with the minimal amount of time and resources possible. However, as pointed out by the Academy to Innovate HR (AIHR), efficiency and productivity are often confused, and there is an important distinction between the two.

“An efficient workplace” they write, “is one where employees complete the right tasks correctly without wasting time and effort.” In other words, being productive is about (for example) how many cars an assembly line can produce in one day. Being efficient is about how we optimize that process to ensure that as many cars as possible are manufactured in that period without wasting time, resources or energy. It requires analytical thought and takes into account factors other than just quantity or volume, such as quality and compliance. Working efficiently is often productive, but working productively isn’t always efficient.

Characteristics of Businesses Successfully Working Efficiently

Workplace efficiency is about having the right tools in place to allow employees to do their jobs and to prioritise tasks appropriately. It also requires the right workplace culture, which typically consists of several characteristics developed over a long period. Below are some of the characteristics most common to efficient workplaces, so take some time to consider whether these reflect your workplace and how you can help to nurture these characteristics. 

A Culture of Workplace Innovation

A recent study into employee innovativeness and job performance found that the more favourable an organisation’s culture of workplace innovation, the more employees are likely to thrive and to continually analyse the efficacy of their skills and attitudes. A supportive approach towards workplace innovation encourages experimentation and entrepreneurship, increasing the likelihood of employees making improvements to the efficiencies of their processes. Make sure to read our article on innovation in the workplace for examples of how to improve the culture towards innovation in your business.

Clear and Unrestricted Communication

A McKinsey study found that effective communication within teams leads not only to more efficient working practices but to enhanced team collaboration and productivity. Constructive communication requires either physical or perceived proximity and can be supported by digital tools and technologies, especially when you are trying to engage a remote workforce. However, it also requires a strong level of understanding between team members, and this is built through things like problem-solving activities and team-building days.

A Supportive Working Environment

Employee engagement and well-being are imperative to inspiring efficient working practices, and this can be supported by both the working environment and the workplace culture. It can be as simple as ensuring that employees have access to comfortable, ergonomic workstations with good natural lighting and spaces for relaxation. Building a positive workplace culture, however, can be slightly more challenging but can be achieved through a strong approach to work-life balance, and nurturing leadership qualities with an emphasis on positive reinforcement and employee recognition. 

Two professionals seated at a meeting room table, engaging and smiling in a discussion.

Strategies for Improving Efficiency in the Workplace</H2>

As we’ve already seen, true work efficiency is achieved through having a strong workplace culture that nurtures and supports our teams. However, there are some simple behaviours you can adopt – whether in your work or that of your team – to improve efficiency in your work.

Write a Daily To-Do List

Writing a to-do list has been demonstrated to reduce cognitive burdens associated with the tasks on those to-do lists. Essentially, once we have committed to a task, we think less about that task. Not only does a to-do list keep us on track for the day, but it also creates the space for us to allocate cognitive energy and focus towards other tasks, allowing us to complete them with fewer distractions. Aim to write a to-do list of four or five items at the beginning of each working day and prioritise them. It doesn’t matter if you don’t manage to complete everything on your list – having a plan will allow you to focus throughout the day and complete your tasks more efficiently. 

List Your Achievements

Related to the previous point, there is a certain satisfaction that comes from crossing an item off of your to-do list. However, rather than just crossing items off, it’s worth proactively keeping a list of completed achievements or professional accomplishments. This can help to build motivation, which inspires drive and focus during task completion. It also allows you to take a step back and focus your work on what you’re trying to achieve, rather than just being aimlessly productive. This helps to curate overall strategic efficiency.

Schedule in Free Time

Time management in the workplace is exceptionally important in inspiring efficiency across your working day. It might sound counterproductive, but scheduling periods of free time throughout your week can help you work more efficiently elsewhere. We will all be familiar with the frustration of trying to make our way through our daily to-do list and being interrupted by urgent requests or unplanned tasks, only to have to juggle both simultaneously and feel like we’re not doing either particularly well. If you have planned slots of free time in your diary – perhaps an hour each day – you can allocate this time to unforeseen tasks, allowing you to give your entire focus to the work you had planned on a given day.

Schedule in Time for Emails

Another tip for effective time management in the workplace is to schedule time throughout the day to check your emails. With the average worker checking their emails 77 times a day, it’s not hard to imagine how this can impact productivity levels and the efficiency with which we’re able to complete a given task. We recommend turning off email notifications and committing to checking your emails twice a day – once first thing in the morning after you’ve written your to-do list, and once after lunch. If you’re worried about missing anything urgent, you can put a note on your email signature or activate an out-of-office indicating how colleagues can contact you in an emergency.

Set Deadlines and Time Limits

Working without structure or a timeframe is a recipe for inefficiency, as very few of us can maintain focus indefinitely. The easiest thing you can do is to set yourself clear deadlines for each task. Not only will this help you to prioritise your workload, it will provide you with focus and motivation to complete your work efficiently. The second thing you can do is to structure your time. The Pomodoro Technique, for example, is popular among students revising for exams but works equally well in the workplace. Dividing each half hour into 25 minutes of work and a five-minute break focuses your work time, as well as giving you something to look forward to, which in turn increases your motivation.

Improve Your Team Communications

As we’ve already seen, one of the keys to adopting efficient behaviours is having clear channels of communication. This can be particularly challenging if you have a fully remote or hybrid workforce because it’s easy to misunderstand intent or tone when you’re relying on written or even just verbal communication. Video conferencing software allows your team to communicate with the aid of visual cues and body language, enabling much more efficient communication. This is particularly useful in a hybrid setup where you have some colleagues collaborating in person, and some dialling in. In these situations, it’s worth investing in an interactive display, allowing all participants to see and hear each other clearly, and even to contribute to shared working documents in real-time.

Optimise Your Organisation System

This applies to both your physical and digital storage systems on a personal level but, more importantly, across your wider team. When it comes to task completion, much of our efficiency is lost in having to ask colleagues to signpost us to files or consulting with those who have subject-specific knowledge. Having a clear, global shared filing structure allows our team members to find resources efficiently, while the creation of shared knowledge banks allows us to troubleshoot without having to interrupt a colleague or wait for their availability. Whether you’re using a physical storage system or a cloud-based storage system such as OneDrive, make sure it’s organised and that the folder logic is consistent across teams.

Discard and Delegate

How many things do you do at work simply because you’ve always done them and not because you need to do them? It’s a good idea to periodically audit and assess your workload. Start by identifying tasks that you could stop doing with no immediate negative consequences and relinquish these. If you think they might have future benefits, you can keep a record of them to reinstate when you have appropriate resources. Next, identify tasks that can be delegated with minimal effort – things that need to be done but don’t need to be done by you. Delegate these to team members but make sure you carefully assess to whom you delegate each task. This requires a knowledge of your team’s skills, where one colleague might be better suited to creative tasks and another to analytical tasks, for example. Discarding and appropriately delegating will increase efficiency across your overall team, but also allow you to focus on priority tasks with fewer distractions.

Set SMART Goals

Examine your priorities, strategic ambitions and responsibilities, and start setting SMART goals. SMART stands for specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and timely, and the technique has been demonstrated to provide structure in our work and drive success. When setting a goal, ask yourself whether it’s realistic and specific, rather than being overly ambitious and amorphous; define how you’ll demonstrate its success; and ensure that it is relevant to your work and that you have set yourself a clear deadline.  Getting into a habit of defining and delivering on these SMART goals can improve work efficiency as it increases motivation, confidence and the ambition to succeed in your tasks. 

How Can Efficiency be Increased in My Workplace?

To increase and maintain efficiency on a long-term basis, you must cultivate the ideal cultural conditions within your workplace. Employees should feel professionally supported, have a sense of positive well-being, feel comfortable being innovative and self-directed, and practice clear communication.

You can implement digital tools and hardware to support this, such as cloud-based storage systems and interactive displays to facilitate efficient hybrid working practices. It also helps to approach your work in a thoughtful, analytical manner, asking yourself why you’re working on something, prioritising your tasks, setting SMART goals, and carving out time for unplanned work.

To find out how Promethean can help with improving efficiency in the workplace, contact us today.

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