Five easy steps to keeping your business running smoothly and your employees happy, while reducing need for clutter and complications.
Now that your business is set up and operational, how can you improve it and make it run efficiently? Efficiency not only reduces operating costs, but believe it or not it can also add more hours to your day.
An efficient business can achieve its goals with minimum effort, waste, and cost. However, each business is unique, so there isn’t one particularly successful method of optimizing your business’s efficiency.
That said, the below 5 steps are a good start to be more efficient.
Step 1: Encourage synergy. When you eliminate communication barriers, you encourage individuals to work together and not against each other (or worse, in parallel to one another!). Creating a central space that will act as an information hub will allow collaborations and encourage productivity. Giving your team access to information is key to making quick and smart business decisions.
Step 2: Go paperless. Forget about print bills, letters, invoices, etc. There are many solutions out there allowing for electronic invoices and other customer communications. Subscribe to service providers that actually offer electronic billing and cancel any paper bills (banks, telecom providers, suppliers, etc).
“Efficiency not only reduces operating costs, but believe it or not it can also add more hours to your day.
Not only will going green save you money, but it will make filing, processing, and overall cost management easier. Paperless also means utilizing a digital cloud to manage your operations and to store your files and documents, at a minimum cost.
Going paperless can apply to marketing. Utilize online search engines and bring customers in instead of reaching out to customers and incurring additional cost.
Step 3: Hire the right personnel! This sounds redundant, but imagine how much value a good employee can bring to the business. And once you have the right employees, utilize them by delegating tasks and entrusting them to do the job.
Micromanagement not only wastes time, but it can be detrimental to morale. This must be avoided at all costs when running a business, even more so in an efficient one.
“An efficient business can achieve its goals with minimum effort, waste, and cost.
Step 4: Improve employee satisfaction by providing a work environment that invites creativity and passion. Consider introducing flexible working hours or the freedom to work remotely. Virtual offices are proven to save small business precious time.
Set a timeframe to check emails across the organization. Not only will you minimize time wastage sifting through email, but tasks will be accomplished sooner rather than later and will result with a feeling of accomplishment, a positive feeling that business owners should seek.
Step 5: Develop a long-term technology plan. Dependency on technology is at the ultimate high these days. So imagine how frustrating it is to be working on outdated devices with choppy performance.
Businesses cannot afford unplanned shopping sprees for gadgets to manage those devices and hardware. Predicting replacements and new purchases helps manage costs as well as minimize potential business disruptions.
The road to being efficient is not limited to these 5 steps. In fact, there are numerous books and articles written on this very subject. These five steps are a good start, but bear in mind that like most critical
