What does a good business need to survive? Most answers will include Business Development, Business Strategy and Business Efficiency.
It would be best if you prioritised business efficiency to get the best results from your company. Streamlining your processes and ironing out any issues can make dividends and help drive your business towards achieving your goals and objectives. Business development and business strategy should be of the highest priority.
Meetings can feel like they’re stagnating and unproductive, or deadlines can be missed by a couple of days – which isn’t ideal for the success and reputation of your company. But how can you increase business efficiency levels? This post will explain nine handy tips to look at and see how you could implement them within your organisation.
We’ll cover the following:
- Automate Tasks Where Possible
- Face-to-Face Communication is Preferred
- Limit Any Interruptions
- Short Scrums Over Long Meetings
- Single-Tasking
- Ad-Hoc “Got a Minute” Meetings Need to Go
- Outline a Process and Stick to it
- Use Task Management Software
- Promote Open Communication Within the Business
Use AI to Automate Tasks Where Possible
Mind-numbing tasks are one of the main ways employees can quickly become unmotivated. Unfortunately, getting away from some of the tedious tasks involved in running a business is impossible. When tasks are tedious, staff can often put them off, slowing progress.
Automating tasks has become even more efficient and accurate with the rise of artificial intelligence (AI). Mind-numbing tasks that humans previously performed can now be done by machines using advanced algorithms and machine learning. By incorporating AI, automation has become an even more necessary tool for modern businesses. It alleviates the boredom and errors associated with repetitive tasks, freeing employees to focus on tasks requiring human input and ultimately increasing business efficiency. Developing a better business strategy with automation and AI can bring numerous benefits, such as improved productivity and a higher-quality end product.
Examples of tasks that can be automated using AI include customer service, accounting, marketing, and human resources.
Face-to-Face Communication is Preferred
Whilst dropping a colleague a quick email or instant message may be the favoured way for your team to communicate, it’s not the most efficient. These methods both have their benefits, but they increase the chance of deeper back and forth, which inevitably slows down solving the problem.
A face-to-face conversation is instant and can help when your team members have questions or queries that they need clarifying. There’s nothing worse than massive email threads when all you need is a simple answer, is there? With face-to-face communication, you rule out the possibility of losing critical information in long email chains or expired chat archives.
Not waiting for a reply or wasting time trolling through old conversations is far more efficient for businesses. Plus, face-to-face communication will help working relations between employees. Anybody can sit behind a computer and ask questions. Yet, it takes the right team members to have the perfect relationship, build a working culture, increase morale, and help you in business development.
However, some things must be organised through an invite or an email. Invitations to essential meetings can easily escape the mind if dropped in passing, but an email reminder linked to a calendar is an excellent way of staying organised. The problems and topics of the meeting should be talked out and discussed face to face, with notes being taken to relay to the further team. This is another way that your business strategy will help you.
Limit Any Interruptions
Constant interruptions are detrimental to each employee’s efficiency. Which, in turn, affects the overall business too. Whether it’s departmental meetings, mid-morning breaks or whole company updates, these can all interrupt your working day.
To combat this, businesses can schedule many meetings for one day rather than multiple weekly meetings. That way, they’re dedicating time to meetings on one day of the week and not stopping and starting tasks and constantly having to break off.
Blocking out chunks of time may help your workforce work more efficiently too. This allows them to be constantly focused for the amount of time – and also allows other team members to see that they don’t want to be disturbed. Therefore, your whole team will be working more efficiently, helping you in business development.
As we said, meetings aren’t the only offenders interrupting working days. Email and instant-messaging chat platforms can prove to be a big distraction. Whether using tools that silence notifications (unless seriously urgent) or introducing company policies around communication tools, you should experiment with different methods to suit different employee working needs.
Short Scrums Over Long Meetings
Business meetings are a necessity; there’s no denying that. But do they always have to be long and drawn out? In short, no. Long meetings are usually a sign that a lot of them are spent filled with waffles and unproductive chat. It’s best practice to hold short meetings that are full of engagement and are beneficial to the broader team. Creating a meeting agenda will allow you to keep on track and will stay within the time limit of the meeting.
10-minute daily huddles are an excellent way of informing your team about everybody’s key focuses. Short meetings are a good way of keeping employees up to speed on business developments but are also key to streamlining processes and reducing time-wasting. Therefore, improving your overall business efficiency.
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Start Single-Tasking
While multitasking and spinning many plates that one commonly considers good things in an employee can be detrimental to their overall productivity. Plus, if workers are distracted by other jobs when focusing on one particular task, the chances of making mistakes or not producing work to their highest ability are higher.
Single-tasking is the idea of working on one job until complete rather than dipping in and out of several jobs simultaneously. This doesn’t just refer to the overall job too. Having many windows and browser tabs on your computer can also affect your productivity. Single-taking requires you to have just the files, tabs and browser windows open that you require – reducing any further room for distraction. If your business strategy is on point, you can omit these issues.
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Ad-Hoc “Got a Minute” Meetings Need to Go
How often do you hear “Have you got a minute?” in your office daily? We bet that it’s quite a lot. These types of chats and small meetings are the ones that cause the most disruption among workers, which has a direct impact on productivity.
When somebody comes over for a chat, it will always be more than one or a few minutes. It’s more likely to be 15 or 20 minutes, which, if it happens regularly in your office, ’s a lot of disruption time. If these chats happen across the wider team, managing your time throughout the business is inefficient.
Instead of ad-hoc meetings like these, we suggest that you implement booking in short meetings and put a time limit on them. That way, the meeting only has to go on for the necessary time, and your team can manage their time as efficiently as possible. This encourages your team members to get straight to the point and allows them to prepare for what you will discuss – encourage them to keep constant notes of any thoughts that may arise.
Outline a Process and Stick to it.
Research and investigate how your business efficiency can be improved. This could involve tracking staff hours, tracking time spent on each account or even chatting with your workforce for ideas. The feedback from this research should help you in business development.
Businesses invest much time researching and moulding the perfect streamlined process, so why do some not bother sticking to it? This defeats the objective of researching and having a process in place, as ignoring it would be a massive waste of time and any money you’ve put into it. Your business strategy should include avoiding these.
If you change something, ensure you have the full business buy-in. There’s no point in some of the business abiding by it and some of it not – it won’t reach its true potential. And your business development will be quite slow. It would be best to ensure everybody is on board and all your staff members work with the same system to achieve shared goals and objectives.
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streamline processes
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improve company efficiency
my business
business strategy
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Use Task Management Software
As mentioned earlier, emails have their perks and benefits, but they’re not the ideal place to host meaningful conversations. Email chains can become lengthy between clients or team members, making it increasingly challenging to dig out critical information. Not only is it challenging, but time-consuming too.
Whereas task management software allows jobs to be managed all in one place and accessed by everybody working on it too. This creates transparency across all jobs and allows others to pick up from where you left off – if you’re on annual leave and need an urgent client fix, for example.
The fact that tasks don’t have to stop because the accountable team members aren’t in the office increases business efficiency. Plus, you can use it to track project progress, reporting to clients more accurately and providing more detailed updates. This should be another key point of your business strategy.
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business development
task management software
productivity tips
streamline processes
workplace communication
meeting efficiency
single-tasking
automation in business
improve company efficiency
my business
business strategy
” width=”801″ height=”401″>
Promote Open Communication Within the Business
Communication is one of the main pillars of efficiency and overall success. But it goes beyond dealing with problems face-to-face. How comfortable are your employees in voicing their concerns? Or are they in a position where they feel they can give negative feedback to the broader team? Open communication is a must for building a winning culture.
The best way to improve business efficiency is to encourage feedback, ideas and open communication within your team. After all, you can’t be everywhere at once, so your employees may notice ways you can improve your process that you might not. It’ll make for a more efficient and productive workplace if employees feel comfortable. After all, business development has more than a few factors.
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business development
task management software
productivity tips
streamline processes
workplace communication
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single-tasking
automation in business
improve company efficiency
my business
business strategy
” width=”801″ height=”401″>
Increase the Efficiency of Your Embroidery Business
Embroidery businesses are similar to any others in that they want to be as efficient as possible, whether outsourcing their design to personalised badge companies or wanting their internal process to be as smooth as possible.
Applique badges have helped many businesses in the embroidery industry become more efficient. They take a fraction of the normal embroidery time, businesses to focus on other areas needing more attention and improve their business strategy.
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