Improving use of time vs. allowing waste of time is at the foundation of an emerging paradigm shift across nearly all businesses. Companies are increasingly focused on maximizing time efficiency, which ultimately contributes to cost efficiency, greater productivity and higher profit margins. Emphasis on time management and workplace productivity can also reduce stress levels.

The year-end holidays often mark a period of reduced productivity among businesses. Employees are distracted by holiday imagery everywhere they turn, causing them to think more about family and friends than work. Despite these tendencies, here are effective steps you can take to keep your workforce productive during the holidays.

The pandemic caused many businesses to shift to work at home operations. As shutdown mandates end a good percentage of firms continue to use the work at home model while some have moved toward a hybrid model combining home and office activities. Here’s a look at how to boost worker productivity for home, office or hybrid business models.

Most governments and corporations have issued remote work directives to curb the coronavirus pandemic. If you’re not used to this arrangement, you’ll have a hard time adjusting. Various distractions around the house mean you can’t focus as you would in an office setting.

Daylight before and after work, no getting stuck behind school buses on the commute, and perhaps some trips or vacation time sprinkled in – there are some perks to summer work life. However the rise in temperatures often brings about a dip in productivity; surveys amongst office workers report a 25% decrease in productivity and nearly half of employees admitted to being more distracted in the summer.

In the U.S., people work an average of 45 hours per week and consider 16 of those hours to be unproductive. Businesses and industries have distinct goals and derive from and build off of different resources (donations, profits, contracts, staff size, infrastructure, etc.). However, there is one resource common to and equal among all industries, projects, managers, and employees: time.

Productivity can be treated as a buzzword, or it can be infused into everything your company does.

There is a distinct line between working hard and burning out. Managers want highly engaged, energetic employees—but often it is those employees, the hardest workers, who, after a few months of running hard on a project hit become deflated or quit.