The most profitable companies are like a well-oiled machine. They eliminate bad practices and have their teams on a workflow that allows for higher productivity and less repetitive tasks.
Your business doesn’t have to be on the level of Google or Apple to achieve the same kind of efficiency. You just need to create systems that improve the workflow of your employees. This enables them to work at peak productivity.
At the end of the year, you will likely end have hundreds of lost work hours under your current situation. This equals money lost and also decreases future revenue. Rather than look for new revenue streams to bring in more money, try working with what you already have. First, start by boosting your employees' efficiency. In this article, we will go over several ways to do so.
Before you can create a workflow, you have to know what you are working with. This means time tracking so you can get a clear picture of how work is getting done. You will see which projects are taking the most time and can see where the bottlenecks are there. Or, you may also see that there are a lot of repetitive tasks that you can consolidate.
Without some kind of software, you will miss a lot of what is actually happening. Especially when it comes to the productivity of your employees.
With some software programs, you will see some data which can also show you the kind of returns you are getting from specific employees. There can be direct correlations from the time spent on a certain project to how much of the work was done. Thus showing how much money that employee was able to bring in.
This way you can decide where to focus your efforts as you can clearly see what is working and what isn’t.
Companies and organizations don’t utilize analytics for no reason. Once you’re able to track, consolidate, and analyze this information about your employees and their productivity, you can apply their strengths and work on their weaknesses to improve your business’s processes. Automating them is an excellent way of doing it in order to save time, energy, and costs.
When you take a look at the reports from the time tracker, you will likely see areas that are taking up your employees' time that can be automated. Due to the Internet of Things and improvements to AI, there are many apps that can help your employees do mundane things. This includes signing documents digitally, coordinating and creating schedules, and other tasks that don’t have much of a return. These are areas that can be automated to save them time and allow them to do the work that actually matters.
For instance, minimize the time it takes to fill out a paid time off request by using an app to do so. There are hundreds of similar administrative tasks that don’t need to take more than a few minutes per day when automated.
Because digital software possesses unique functions and features, there’s almost always a need to use multiple tools for your tasks. To navigate them effectively, you can use Trello integrations to connect your Trello boards, any project management tool majority of companies use, along with other productivity tools like Notion, Asana, and GitHub.
Often there are too many different departments working independently of each other. This leads to a lot of overlap in tasks. It mainly happens because people have strict roles within their departments. Instead of allowing this to continue, create some hybrid roles. These will allow for more interaction between different departments and disciplines.
Focus on jobs that will draw on different types of work but require only one person rather than two or more to complete. As an entire organization, collaboration is a vital contributor to your success. Letting your teams and employees work individually on tasks that are supposed to be collaborative is a recipe for disaster.
When managers overmanage or micromanage every aspect of the team’s tasks, it has a dampening effect on efficiency and productivity. It is one of the most inefficient ways to manage a team as it stifles autonomy.
When you have a good system in place there is no need to be constantly butting into your employees' work. They need to make good decisions and will do so when the system works. Micromanaging the team is an indictment of your system and on your management style.
Allowing them space to do the job the way that works best for them is the way to go. Results speak for themselves so let the system and the employees get the job done.
If micromanaging is evident in your company, you should immediately notice decreased employee morale and motivation, which can lead to increased employee turnover. Also, the productivity momentum across departments will drop significantly due to repeated onboarding, training, and re-training of employees.
Instead of observing your employees’ work closely, you can use better and more acceptable alternatives to keep away from micromanaging, such as:
Much time gets wasted when tasks are given to a specific team rather than an individual. If you break down how the team works best then you can assign items to the employee who is likely to get the job done in the most efficient manner.
When a team is responsible for its own dealing out of jobs then it can get bogged down. This can also mess with the workflow of multiple employees. Let your time tracker give you insight into who is best for what types of jobs and then go with that.
