The secret to workplace productivity revealed

Giulia Remondino, MD at Genius in 21 days UK, considers what it takes to really improve workplace productivity

The age-old question about how to create a productive workplace continues to challenge businesses of all shapes and sizes. But are many still missing a trick?

There are a number of approaches to tackling workplace productivity that are now common knowledge to most organisations, such as time management, tackling distractions, setting clear goals and objectives, building in regular break times, making staff feel rewarded and appreciated, developing strong leadership teams and implementing incentive programmes. These are strategies which we often see in everyday business life and they all have a positive impact on business performance, employee engagement and workplace productivity. Many of these will have taken months or years of focus, effort and dedication by an organisation to achieve the required result.

However, there are some other often forgotten factors which are directly related to productivity and are much quicker to implement – one of which is memory.

Over our lifetime, we spend many hours reading books and absorbing information from a variety of sources, trying to store it in our minds, repeating it, re-reading it, re-writing it and so on. If you picture all of this information as individuals bricks stacked on top of each other, the tower would be pretty tall, right? Now consider each of those in your workforce and place their respective knowledge towers next to yours; suddenly you have a pretty impressive fortress going on!

However, as with all fortresses, you need stable foundations and if you start removing the blocks which represent information you or your team have forgotten, suddenly the fortress starts to look a little wobbly and probably much less impressive than it was to begin with.

This is the situation that many organisations find themselves in, trying to maintain a rickety fortress caused by years of applying the wrong methods and strategies for workplace productivity. A hollow fortress may look reasonably ok from the outside, but apply a little pressure and the cracks are likely to appear almost immediately.

Now we come back to the secret of workplace productivity we mentioned earlier; memory! It is entirely possible to learn anything extremely fast, remember it forever and have fun while learning it. This is because our brains are naturally designed to function in this way. It’s at the very root of our survival and evolution, through to every problem solving and ideas creation. Our memory is a fundamental part of our everyday existence and we are programmed to use it properly. We just have to learn how to access the incredible power of our brain.
This is why looking at staff training which focuses on effective mnemonic techniques will help them to quickly learn, store and recall information easily and effortlessly. In a constantly changing and evolving world, organisations need to keep up with the pace of change and this requires their staff to possess the skills needed to keep up too. We often hear stories about the reskilling or upskilling staff in order to improve performance and productivity, so it makes sense to focus on unlocking the cognitive skills that staff already possess, but just don’t know yet how to harness them effectively in the workplace.

If you are interested in learning more about memory training in the workplace, here are a few tips to get started.

Firstly, it it important to acknowledge that our memory is primarily visual and it is much easier to retain images than it is other kinds of information. Picturing specific information or details in a visual way as an image means that your mind is far more likely to remember it and recall it on demand in the future.

Secondly, do you remember those sentences and phrases you used to learn as a kid to remember anything from spelling to times tables to the periodic table? Our brains are constantly looking for patterns and do so by creating chains, as it is a great way to process and remember information. Linking some new information to something you already know helps you to retain that information easier and for longer.

Thirdly, memory is very closely linked to emotions. That’s why we tend to remember particularly exciting, sexy, scary or sad events over those which are a little more mundane. By making information more ‘emotional’, you’ll be surprised how much easier it will be to remember it.

Finally, think about location! Remembering places seems to come very naturally to most people, so by picturing an object in a specific place, rather than with no context, it becomes much easier to recall it.

These are of course only a few starting points and there is so much more which can be applied to help boost employee memory and, subsequently, workplace productivity – but by following these initial steps, you should notice an immediate improvement in memory and information recollection.

About the Author

Giulia Remondino is an experienced Trainer and Mentor and has been the MD of Genius in 21 Days UK since 2016. She specialises in bringing out the best in people by teaching advanced learning techniques. Becoming a Genius in 21 Days means to learn not only how to double your speed at reading, organising and memorising, but also how to make sure you use these skills to create the life you want. Her goal is that more and more people learn how to master their time instead of being mastered by it and therefore fulfill their dreams with new abilities they thought impossible before.

Running one of the branches of Genius in 21 Days, Giulia teaches techniques about speed reading, fast memorisation, long term memorisation, mind mapping, relaxation and concentration, creativity and motivation. She also mentors people after the course.

Giulia is an experienced speaker and has delivered numerous workshops on public speaking, communication, leadership and time management.

For more information visit www.geniusin21days.co.uk