(Akiit.com) Your business vision is the promise you make your customers and your employees to offer them the best possible services. For many, a vision acts like an empowering quote: It describes what could be if all the conditions were reunited. But as a business owner, your vision needs to more than a motivational poster. You need to stand by it and to make it come true. As a result, when resources, skills, time and knowledge are not used properly in many business situations, it becomes essential to make your vision the ultimate fight against inefficiency.
Efficiency is reducing time waste
How much money do companies waste every year on things that are not necessary? Unproductive time is one of the most expensive budget mistakes in the workplace. However, companies still fail to support collaborative technologies and strategies that enable employees to work better together. Travel time, such as planning
meetings out of the office instead of using video conferences and calls, can cost as much as the salary of a full-time employee at the end of the year. Additionally, the meeting culture within the business industry costs US companies up to S37 billion per year, with over 70% of employees complaining that meetings are unproductive.
Efficiency is using the right knowledge
You need to understand your current business situation to choose the best possible course of action for the future. Creating a work process that utilizes the skills you’ve got available in-house and maximizes outputs and profits requires access to business intelligence data via an embedded BI solution, for instance. Working with data, however, needs to be left to a trusted expert. You can’t gain insightful knowledge without a professional data analyst, who can interpret the collected business data and identify for you the most meaningful visualization options. After all, you can only gain knowledge from information that is easy to digest and understand.
Efficiency is working fast
How long does it take to make a decision or to resolve an issue? In companies that continue to rely on a traditional managerial hierarchy, it can take very long for the most simple things to happen. That’s precisely why more and more entrepreneurs embrace the culture of lean thinking, as a way to remove unnecessary obstacles within their structure. According to the lean methodology, your team needs to be trained to this holistic approach to enable continual feedback between all employees as well as improve cross-team collaboration. Indeed, in a lean culture, everyone is connected, meaning that people can exchange expertise and know-how quicker and in real-time.
Efficiency is acknowledging everyone
People with disabilities continue to struggle to find employment or to get access to education and healthcare. There is still pay gaps issues between genders. And finally, racial and sexual discriminations are still part of some workplaces. You may not be able to transform the attitudes, but as a business owner, you can ensure that you provide the same access to your services for all employees and clients.
Building an efficient company is not as easily done as said. However, you can only gain from your efforts in reducing time waste, maximizing data knowledge, embracing lean management, and becoming an accessible company for all.
Staff Writer; Carl Love