Ways to Improve Productivity in Your Business
Time is precious in all aspects of our life, and even more so when we talk about work, in which case its value multiplies. The minutes we save each day can be reinvested in thinking about the company’s overall strategy, in progressing tasks or in rest time. This is where productivity comes in. Ways to improve productivity in your business is by using time management and this is a key element to improve productivity, even through difficult times.
We believe that increasing productivity is essential for all companies: optimizing wasted time spaces allows you to obtain a better return for the same number of hours.
Remember: gaining productivity gives you the opportunity to generate more growth and increase your profits. Now it’s up to you!
In addition to ensuring that we are always at the cutting edge of technology, so that it is neither the computer equipment nor the software that slows us down, the article cites the following techniques:
1. Coordinate and organize
How many hours a year are wasted due to misunderstandings or lack of organization? We can reduce them by establishing clear workflows that are appropriate to the business and our needs. The same thing happens with the organization: instead of wanting to attack several fronts at the same time, it is more practical and more efficient to carry out the tasks one by one, taking into account in a realistic way the time that we will take to complete them. achieve.
Prioritize
Projects are piling up and you don’t know where to start? Prioritizing is the number one rule for maximizing productivity.
Establish an order of priority to efficiently move forward in your work. Your efforts and resources should be focused primarily on priority projects. That is, those likely to generate a greater return on investment.
Develop work plans
Each project must be properly defined. Assign clear and precise roles to each. Create a schedule and set deadlines. Each project actor must know exactly how he must intervene and in what time frame.
Set goals
Working with clear and well-defined objectives makes it possible to work efficiently. Set minimum business goals to achieve for each project and for each role.
2. Short meetings
It is not a question of eliminating meetings, but rather of trying to keep them as short and effective as possible. For this, it is important to establish an agenda of the issues that are going to be dealt with, not to leave it and to end each point with clear and responsible conclusions defined.
Prefer short and concise meetings
Reporting and information sharing are important in business. But keep in mind that too much info kills the info. Repeated meetings are often time-consuming and can be demotivating for your employees.
Instead, keep meetings short and concise. Even collaborative and dynamic! Set an agenda and invite the people directly involved. Not all staff need to attend all meetings. You can plan the presence of certain collaborators for only part of the meeting.
Life Cycle Management: A Comprehensive Guide to Success Across All Business Phases
3. Minimal interruptions
Every interruption is a distraction that wastes our time and concentration, so we should reduce them to a minimum: muting notifications, preventing you from calling us and devoting ourselves exclusively to work will help everything to end faster . It is important to learn how to manage customer calls and emergencies and to understand that they are not always so urgent: often it is better to spend 30 minutes to complete the task we are with and then move on to the next task.
Use new technologies
Many collaborative and innovative tools exist. These aim to increase the productivity of capital by simplifying work, exchanges and the sharing of information. It would be a shame to deprive yourself.
Manage breaks well
To work well and be productive, it is also very important to get enough rest and to do it correctly.
In addition to weekends, it is important to know how to disconnect when leaving the office: avoid looking at your e-mails when you wake up, answering outside working hours and learning to leave work at the office.
Centralize your data
To boost your productivity, you must put in place solutions to save time by centralizing all your data in the same place. Indeed, many companies combine several solutions to store data.
However, difficulties can arise when these solutions are not compatible with each other. To effectively track your customer journey, you need to choose the best way to leverage data by bringing it together on a single platform.
By opting for a coherent ecosystem, you optimize your time and facilitate rapid access to all data.
Read more: Cloud and Digitalization Management Solutions
Automate to improve work efficiency and go mobile
The more you automate your tasks, the more you improve your work efficiency. The most obvious reason is to save time on a daily basis.
Once all your tools are connected to each other, you must of course know how to use them in order to optimize efficiency and boost your productivity.
The perfectly efficient CRM you have chosen will allow you to automate certain scenarios to save time. Set different scenarios to start automatically.
It is therefore becoming essential, in order to boost the productivity of the company, to allow mobile employees to be connected in real time thanks to mobile solutions.
Read also: CRM Customer Relationship Management Solutions
4. Work on the personal productivity of your employees
It is useless to organize everything well in the company if the employees waste time doing their tasks and are not as efficient as they should be. Encourage and reward productivity and help your workers develop it by providing tools and techniques to learn how to be more productive.
Evaluate regularly
To be able to act on the overall productivity of factors, you must first evaluate the work of your teams. Everyone’s work must contribute to the achievement of your turnover objectives.
To do this, base your evaluation on specific criteria that will measure the productivity of your business. The calculation of productivity allows the general assessment of the performance of your company. But it also allows comparison with your competitors. Many productivity indicators exist. You will choose according to the characteristics of your business and the objectives you have set for yourself. We can mention three in particular:
- The productivity rate: masures the performance of resources and the efficiency of processes.
- The productivity rate per position: the productivity rate is detailed according to the workstations
- The overall rate of return: measures the performance of the productive apparatus
Mobilize your employees
The productivity of the labor factor also depends on the commitment of the personnel. For this, it is necessary to encourage initiative. Your employees are on the front line. They are the ones most likely to see anomalies and fix them. Allow them to be a force of proposal in the improvement of processes. Stay tuned and retain proposals that generate productivity gains and economic growth.
Ask your employees to share their opinion
Ask your employees to share their ideas on how to improve productivity, engagement and safety. Keep in mind that not all employees are comfortable talking about topics related to their work environment. In this case, a low-key inquiry can be a good way to encourage dialogue. If you don’t get any feedback, you can always remind your employees by finding the right arguments to convince them.
Product life cycle management (PLM): introduction, growth, maturity, and decline (setup and example)
5. Assess business productivity
Did your teams achieve the revenue objectives that were set? Measure the productivity of your company on specific criteria to act accordingly on the results obtained.
You can base yourself on the following criteria:
- The productivity rate in order to measure the performance of resources as well as the efficiency of processes.
- The productivity rate according to the workstations.
- The overall rate of return.
We are humain and not a machine, the importance is finding the right balance. To date, there are no clear and precise recommendations for making good use of machine-based technologies while preserving the human element.
Create an atmosphere of cooperation
It is obvious that employees who get along well, trust each other and help each other form a strong and more productive team.
Members communicate well and share information easily because they trust each other. A close-knit team faces obstacles, no matter how difficult they must overcome.
Employees who feel professionally engaged have ambitions to rise within their company.
They will voluntarily engage in other projects of the company to accomplish them in parallel with their daily tasks. As long as they are busy, they are less likely to look elsewhere.
Give useful feedback to employees
Feedback, whether positive or negative, is one of the most important motivators for employees and has a direct impact on their productivity. Your employees want their work to be recognized, but also to receive advice when they do not achieve their objectives.
Reward a job well done
Employee recognition programs, when designed well, boost employee productivity, motivate them and improve retention rates. Traditional rewards such as being named “Employee of the Month” are still effective. But the most innovative companies find many other ways to reward their employees, from gift cards to spend at restaurants to tickets to sporting events.
To get the most out of your recognition program, celebrate every achievement and directly congratulate your most deserving employees. Involve employees themselves in the process by allowing them to nominate colleagues who have gone above and beyond.
At AB Consulting, we believe that it is necessary for a company to be productive so that it can develop and grow without obstacles and in a fluid way. Once you know some ways to improve productivity in your business, it will be much easier to achieve Managerial Excellence.
Photo credit: KELLEPICS via Pixabay
