5 Ways to Increase the Efficiency of your Business

As the world enters into a recession fueled by the coronavirus pandemic and lockdowns, it has never been more important to increase the efficiency of your business. Cutting costs and “trimming the fat” may be a daunting prospect, and it may even mean letting go of some of your senior team, but it’s the only way to ensure the longevity of your business. To give you a hand, we’ve put together some tips on creating a more efficient and structured business….

Depend on Automation

Whether you’re sending out salary sheets to your employees or giving customers receipts, it makes sense to automate as much of your business as possible. Nowadays, automation is not a luxury or a “cutting edge” – it’s necessary in order to compete and reduce waste. Look at your current monotonous tasks and think about ways that they can be automated; there is software for virtually everything nowadays, and whilst it’s not all cheap, there are still plenty of cost-effective solutions designed to save your team time and help you with productivity.

Adopt a Single-task Policy

Nowadays, professionals are required to multitask. But it just doesn’t work. Although most of us are capable of working on more than one project at a time, it makes more sense to focus on each job as it comes in to give it your full attention. Don’t move onto your next project until you have finished the current one – that way, you’ll get more done in a shorter amount of time, and you’ll actually complete your list rather than half-finishing five different jobs (and then ultimately having to get back into the mindset for each of them to finish them properly).

Work with a Facilities Management Company

Though there’s no harm in asking your employees to clean their office spaces and maintain the grounds of your business, working with an FM provider could be a better option. Services like cleaning, grounds maintenance, security, and office management can all be outsourced to a professional team of experts who will ultimately save you time and money, freeing up your team to be focused and productive, and ensuring your premises are running efficiently.

Make Communication a Priority

Next up, it’s important to create an open, inclusive environment at work where your staff can communicate with each other freely. As well as encouraging staff to meet face-to-face rather than email each other from the next desk, you should make sure that everyone is able to voice their concerns and criticisms openly and fairly. After all, your team knows better than anyone else how you business is run – being an open, responsive boss requires you to give them some responsibility and help them improve their working conditions and workload. If they’ve found a way to streamline a particular pain-point, listen to them: it might just work.

Say no to Unnecessary Meetings

Finally, call time on those “have you got a few minutes?” meetings – unscheduled chats are often a huge time-sink and distract workers. Most of the time, nothing can be accomplished with a few minutes’ chat, and so you’ll end up sitting in the boardroom for half an hour, running through ideas. If you do need to meet face-to-face for a chat, have a designated topic and timespan – if you’re not done in 10 minutes, arrange a follow up another day.

Increasing the efficiency of your business won’t happen overnight, but the tips we’ve offered above will give you some food for thought. We wish you the best of luck in your approach.