(Akiit.com) To keep business running and ensure you’re turning a healthy profit month after month, you need to stay productive. Wasting time means wasting money, and you’ll never be reaching your full potential as a business. Here are just a few ways you can increase efficiency and productivity in your company.
Use software to automate areas
Technology moves at an incredibly fast pace, and this is something you can take advantage of as a business owner. Softwares are becoming increasingly advance, some even enabling you to automate entire processes or even departments of your business. When you’re able to cut out a human worker, it saves you time, hassle and human error. At this stage, all businesses are going to need employees for certain jobs, but replacing them where possible and providing the workers you do have with the best software can massively boost your efficiency and productivity.
Outsource
When you outsource to a professional third party company, they already have everything in place needed to get the job done, and the expertise to do it all to a high standard. Instead of opening new departments yourself, hiring staff and giving yourself more to personally oversee, why not outsource? It could be anything from your accounting department to HR to health and safety. Even smaller tasks such as blog writing and video creation can be outsourced, there are thousands of talented freelancers online that are experienced in their area and ready to go. Find a good freelancing site and source the talent you would like to work with. When you don’t need to hire more staff, buy equipment for them to use, train them and everything else, you can get to work much more quickly. So in many cases, it can save you money (despite the fact that there are fees that will be paid to whoever you work with) as well as improve efficiency.
Retrain your workers
A successful business is an adaptable one. An idea which was a hit at first might slowly become obsolete as technology and customer demand changes over the years. However, if you’re adaptable you can make changes that keep people interested in your business. Take internet cafes as an example, once booming businesses, demand slowed down to a trickle once computers and the internet were common in people’s homes. But smart business owners knew they could appeal to a new crowd, and rebranded as study cafes for students, somewhere for those on a low income to search for jobs or for gamers to enjoy lan parties.
The issue with making changes however, is that your business and therefore your employees roles can change over time. To ensure everyone is still performing their best, update your worker’s training and education as needed. For example, as new technology and softwares are being introduced to your business, you need to know that everyone is able to use these correctly. Even software which is designed to automate and make things quicker such as Google Ads automation for 2019 will slow you down and affect productivity if your staff don’t know how to use it properly.
Get your head in the cloud
Getting into the cloud is essential for modern businesses. If you’re yet to take the plunge, what you need to know is it’s essentially a network of online servers, which allow you to carry out some or all of the tasks that your business does through the internet. It’s commonly used as a way to backup data (since servers away from the office mean that if anything happens to your computers, you have a safe backup that you can access from anywhere). However, it’s much more than just a way to backup. The cloud can be used for everything from accounting to sharing documents.
If business is product-based, the cloud can even be used as part of your production process too. One of the main benefits right now is that if your business is run online, you or your employees can work from anywhere in the world. You don’t necessarily need to come into the office every day. Working from home is a growing trend and something that lots of business owners are seeing the benefit of.
Improved mood and job satisfaction from employees and less sick days being just a few of them. Think about it, how many hours have you lost where employees car wouldn’t start or the trains aren’t running correctly. Maybe they had a minor illness that made getting to work and sitting at their desk wasn’t possible, but they were still well enough to work from their sofa. As a company owner, you should be taking advantage of the cloud as enables you run and manage everything in your business much more efficiently.
Staff Writer; Lisa Ford