What Would It Take To Improve Efficiency In Your Workplace?

Efficiency in the workplace means a lot of different things. For example, it’s in the way we work, the results we see, and the money we make. It’s also in the way we choose to run things and make the right decisions regarding the people we manage and the tasks we assign. All in all, it’s far from the neat package we assume business efficiency to be, and it takes a careful eye and a bit of outside knowledge to help us see that.

This is why this post is here. Efficiency is something we strive for in the working world daily, but it can be hard to run a tight ship when you’re a small business competing on this global scale. 

Maybe you’re constantly having to run overtime? Or you’re never sure where your employees are or what they’re doing? Or maybe you’re having trouble making new connections? No matter what it is that’s slowing you down, it’s time to rethink the way you approach the way you work with the help of the points below. 

Investigate Your Operations

The first thing to do is to understand your processes and the way you work. Be sure to work thoroughly here; there are many components of workforce management and often enough, we ignore one or two of them. We forget what makes people productive, how efficiency feeds into that, and what tweaks we can make to improve the performance of everyone around us. 

So, put simply: what does your company get up to? How do you recruit? How do you pay your employees? How do you bring in new customers? How do you approach social media and the online world? How do you balance the books? How do you research the way the market is moving? 

All of these ‘how dos’ make up the way you operate, and without going back to the drawing board and understanding each part of the chain, it’ll be hard to make any further improvements. Take your time with this kind of review to ensure you don’t miss anything. 

Know Your KPIs

Your KPIs are the factors you look to ensure you’re doing a good job. At the same time, you could be tracking entirely the wrong kind of KPIs for your purposes - bad. After all, what we think of as key performance indicators are often entirely the opposite, such as the profit we make, or how our customers feel about us. 

Instead, we should be looking at the processes behind these statistics. What are you doing to drive profit? What are you doing to keep customers happy? How are you operating as a force to make things happen within your company? None of the above stats matter unless you know how you’re achieving them, and you won’t know if you’re achieving the results you want if you’re not measuring these kinds of KPIs. 

To make a proper KPI that is worth tracking, you need to think about tasks that affect any of your teams as a whole. A KPI also needs to be something you can correct if you find the results, after a month or so of tracking, to be unsatisfactory. And most of all, you should be thinking about setting KPIs that cannot be easily affected such as the amount of labor used per day. 

Speed Up Your Accounting Process

Accounting is one of the biggest processes your business has to deal with, and that can cause a lot of lag within your departments. At the core, there’s a lot of paperwork involved, as well as only one or two hands to carry out the filing, and that can put working hours entirely out of line with the rest of your workforce. Simply put, speeding up the way accounting works within your business is one of the best ways to tackle the efficiency problem on your hands. 

But what can you do? First off, it’s a good idea to take your entire accounts department digital. Use cloud software to allow access as and when you need it, allow the software itself to take care of the bulk of the work, and take advantage of the limitless storage capacity. At the very least, you’ve removed the flexibility issue that was present before. Your accountants can move faster without needing to work any harder. 

Cut Back on Management Meetings

Project management is an issue across the board in the world of small businesses. It’s often at the core of the issues with efficiency, and it’s also one of the simplest things to fix in every department. After all, if you’re constantly needing to schedule meetings to keep up with the way work is moving, you cut back on the amount of time and effort that goes into projects themselves. Multiply this by every single thing you’re working on and you’ve got a recipe for disaster. 

This is why management meetings should be a thing of the past within your company. You can schedule them once a month maybe, but if they’re costing you resources weekly, automate them out. Write emails instead, and deliver project reports as you go. You can even use automation apps to keep an active track of what any team is up to - just don’t make them attend as many meetings.

Adjust Your Company Working Hours

How flexible are your working hours? How often do your employees fall inside of these working hours, when it comes to taking tasks home with them or needing to be present and around before their shift even starts? Because if more than one member of your workforce has often had to reschedule their life around the work they do for you, it’s a clear sign your working hours need some work themselves. 

You need to be more flexible to be efficient, as we mentioned above. The more people can work to their rhythms, the more will get done, and the less time you’ll spend chasing projects up. Once again, if you’re working with a KPI that monitors time on the floor, rather than what’s done during that time, it’s time to refine it to better represent the way your employees work. 

Come Up with a Bonus

Last but not least, maybe it’s time for a company-wide bonus to go around? Or as an analyst would advise, introduce an incentive. Your workforce is incredibly capable, so why not take a moment to reward them in turn? Give them a morale boost and something to work towards as a small way to thank them for their time and effort. 

This bonus can take many forms. Maybe an extra vacation day? Maybe a payroll bonus? Maybe the chance to work from home permanently? You can even provide multiple incentives to the different people on any team, to ensure they benefit from more than one bonus. Or, to better foster the team spirit at play, offer the incentive to the team as a whole. 

Within the workplace, efficiency has a lot of factors to consider. When you isolate one without thinking about the others, you let your company and your employees down. So, take your time to find what’s going wrong or what’s lagging, and then look behind it to see the processes at play. Focus on them for better results.