vThere are lots of ways to improve your business' efficiency . Here are some of the important tips that Charles McMillan, Founder of Stand With Main Street personally does in his business:
The best way to improve your business' status is by motivating your employees. By creating a pleasant environment and giving proper guidance, you can make your workers satisfied and motivated to their full potential in every task or project they are assigned to.
You may think that your business service is already doing good and that you just have to maintain what you are doing. Well, it may be different from your customer's perspective. By listening to their feedback, you allow your company to grow more and set future goals that would cater to the needs of your repeating or new clients.
In addition, Sylvia Manman Kang, CEO of Mira also shared that since most of us are working from home, it may be hard for you to monitor everyone. The best way to improve your business efficiency is by giving your employees a set of goals that they need to reach for each week. By doing this, you can let them know that they don't have to work from 9 AM to 5 PM as long as they meet the target goals and get their deliverables done.
Automate all you can, whether it's delivering pay stubs to staff or sending receipts to suppliers. In today's dynamic climate, business automation is no longer a luxury; it is a requirement. “Automating repetitive tasks saves time and encourages the workers to focus on more productive tasks that involve critical thought or human interaction.
Although implementing automated processes will be more expensive at first, it will save money and improve business performance in the long run.
Although sending a fast email or chat message to a coworker can seem to be a more efficient way of getting a response, the resulting back-and-forth may sometimes take longer than a quick face-to-face conversation. When you need to send a short message to your coworkers, Skype, Google Chat, and other online networking tools come in handy. Face-to-face engagement, on the other hand, greatly accelerates the process of solving a problem, addressing a query, or clarifying something important.
How do you ensure that your workers strike a balance between the two for maximum efficiency? Encouraging workers to speak freely with one another when they need to create a steady flow of information.
While chat and email have their uses, ensuring that your employees are comfortable talking face-to-face will keep your company running smoothly and ensure that an issue that could have been solved in a five-minute face-to-face chat does not turn into a 20-message email thread.
If your employees are having difficulty performing tasks efficiently, it could be due to frequent interruptions. “Staff meeting at 9 a.m., department meeting at 11 a.m., lunch at noon—if your employees are having trouble completing tasks efficiently, it could be due to constant interruptions.
We tend to arrange several meetings on the same day rather than spreading them out throughout the week, and we set aside time on our calendars to work actively. Blocking off time for uninterrupted work can help your employees concentrate and work more efficiently.
Meetings aren't the only distractions; frequent email messages, chat message pop-ups, and updates from your in-house project management software can all cause work to be disrupted. After an interruption, it usually takes about a minute to get back to work. As a result, we use email notification reduction methods like “Inbox Pause.” There are several tools and software available to help you stay focused on your job and work more effectively.
While meetings are usually considered necessary, they may consume a significant portion of the working day. Meetings that are shorter and more effective, covering the essentials in under 10 minutes.
Every day, we have a 10-minute meeting called the Daily Huddle as a company.
The meeting acts as a firehose of facts, including a roundup of our main performance metrics, a recognition of successes, and the identification of opportunities for improvement.
Not only is keeping meetings short and sweet a good way to keep all staff up to date with any new innovations within the organization, but it also forces a streamlined meeting process and saves time. This process keeps us working efficiently, as unnecessary meetings are avoided.
We all think we're great multitaskers; right now, I have 11 tabs open on my laptop, which is a low number compared to some days. However, experts believe that while people can multitask, they aren't inherently more efficient. So, here's where the concept of single-tasking (or concentrating solely on one task until it's finished) comes into play.
Our whole organization is currently focused on improving our ‘single-tasking skills, with the aim of not going on to the next project until the current one is finished.
‘Single-tasking' helps you to get more done faster by not letting tasks rot on the vine when they're almost finished,” she continues. It's easy to fool yourself into thinking you're creative when you're working on ten tasks at once but nothing is really getting out into the world.
Focusing on “single-tasking” once a project is finished allows you to actually implement rather than juggle too many tasks that nothing gets completed.
“The most effective tip any business can ever consider is to invest in building their presence in social media, especially now that the trend is scaling digital already”, says John Stevenson, Marketing Specialist at My GRE Exam Preparation. What businesses should know by this time is how important an online presence is to a company, especially in building retention and generating sales. While a lot of businesses will tell you otherwise, and ask you still to focus on your physical shop, it pays off to be ahead of the game especially in this fast paced environment.