12 Vital Productivity Tips for Small Businesses
Business productivity is known to be a critical factor that affects the growth and shareholder value of any company.
For small businesses, productivity is an even more important factor. It not only helps increase your sales and revenue, but it also helps you grow your customer base. People likely to associate with a company or brand that are productivity-focused.
No one can deny that getting things done on schedule with the lowest possible input costs and time is an admirable quality. But how can it be done, and is there a formula that you can apply to be productive over and over again?
While there aren’t any fixed recipes for success, there are a few things you can do to ensure that your company stays as productive as it can be. Here are our top 12 tips for improving business productivity.
1. Identify key drivers
What are main aspects of your business that affect productivity? For instance, does your company’s productivity depend heavily on the performance of your employees? If so, you can use an employee monitoring software to identify what key aspects of your employees’ daily tasks affect their productivity the most.
CurrentWare is one such software that allows you to observe remotely how your employees approach their routine tasks.
2. Delegate, automate, restructure
There’s no shortage of innovative software that allows you to automate time-consuming tasks. For instance, new technology allows you to implement an automated answering service with AI, eliminating the need for your staff to answer every single incoming telephone call.
Once you’ve identified the factors that affect productivity, isolate any tasks that are repetitive and unproductive. Use CurrentWare’s BrowseReporter tool to generate employee activity monitoring reports and discuss the findings with your team. Delegate all repetitive tasks to an automation technology and restructure tasks that are hampering productivity.
3. Outsource
More and more companies are outsourcing their routine tasks to remote workers. In fact, many small businesses have all virtual teams that handle almost every aspect of their business, from administrative duties and content management, to marketing and web development.
To ensure that their remote employees are billing work correctly and performing tasks as per guidelines, businesses often make use of employee tracking software.
4. Prepare clear manageable goals
A lot of companies, particularly startups, set themselves unclear and overambitious goals. As a business, if you try to grow too quickly by diverting your resources and attention in different directions, you may end up spreading yourself too thin. Instead, set goals that are clear and achievable for your entire team.
5. Make important tasks your first tasks
One of the first things most people do each morning is check their mail. While this may be important, it’s easy to get distracted and start surfing the internet. Regardless of how complex and difficult your most important tasks are, they must be completed first thing in the morning.
Make it a company-wide rule to tackle all important tasks on priority. If you really want to enforce this rule, you could use CurrentWare to monitor employee internet activity at the start of each day.
6. Be in control of your meetings
Meetings are a very important part of managing team performance. However, according to a Clarizen survey, 46 percent of employees consider meetings to be a complete waste of their time. Meetings not only take away time during which employees could be more productively engaged, but they also tend to disrupt the workflow of daily tasks.
Employees have been found to take over an hour to get back to their tasks. For managers, the writing is on the wall: Cut down on the number of meetings as well as the time spent on them.
7. Remove unnecessary distractions
Most people like to customize their workstations to their individual tastes, and that’s totally fine. However, when it comes to working on their computers, there are enumerable distractions that can affect their productivity.
CurrentWare’s BrowseControl feature allows you to block access to websites and control internet access. Such tools help you cut down on the time spent on social media websites, chat pages, news articles and the likes.
8. Encourage team work
No matter how good certain individuals are at their jobs, they cannot do their tasks effectively unless they’re well supported by a team. An environment that promotes effective communication and good understanding between team members is vital to ensuring that tasks are completed on time, especially when it comes to the customer success process, which requires seamless coordination and collaboration across departments to address customer needs promptly and efficiently.
Plan offsite visits and informal activities that create genuine bonding between team members.
9. Invest in the right technologies
Technology can boost business productivity in a number of ways. However, it’s important to select the technology that’s right for your company. For example having a fast and reliable hosting provider, can significantly improve website & company performance. Some companies incorporate advanced technologies without making provisions for specialized equipment and skills that may be necessary to use them effectively. Instead of helping you become more productive, these technologies can become serious liabilities.
If you’re an online business looking to track employee internet usage and restrict web access, choose an employee monitoring software that you can incorporate seamlessly into your organization’s computer network. CurrentWare is one such software that offers smooth integration with your existing systems and requires little to no training to operate and use effectively.
10. Protect yourself from insider threats
Every small business has some amount of proprietary data, customer information and other sensitive data that must not fall in the wrong hands. Virus and malware protection for your computer network can protect you from external threats. But how do you protect yourself from an insider?
The most trusted employees can sometimes cause immeasurable damage to your organization. CurrentWare AccessPatrol helps you keep track of data transferred between your employee’s computers and external devices (such as USB key, external hard drives, mobile phones and etc).
Moreover, just knowing that you’re using an employee activity monitoring tool will serve as a deterrent for anyone who may be planning to leak out sensitive information.
11. Make health a priority
Poor health is often one of the main reasons why employees are unable to work to their full potential. In fact, entire days are lost when an employee is unwell and unable to report to work. If you want to maintain a high level of productivity in your office, make sure your employees get sufficient time and opportunity to recharge and regroup.
In addition to weekends, allow your employees (and yourself) an occasional day off. You’ll be surprised how much it can boost your company’s overall productivity.
12. Make time for family
Our families bring us joy and happiness, and often they’re the main reason why we work so hard. Research studies have shown that happy, contented employees are also the most productive employees.
If your employees are unable to make time for their families because they work shifts, try to change up their work timings so they can get some quality time with their folks.
If you cannot change their work timings, allow them to telecommute sometimes. In any case, you’ve got CurrentWare to monitor and record their activity remotely.
