Every business owner wants to increase their business's productivity. The goal is to maintain or improve the quality of delivery while reducing time and money costs. To achieve this result, good process and people management is necessary, and the use of technology is paramount.
It seems very complicated, but it can become much easier than you imagine. Check out 7 essential steps to increase your company's productivity!
1 – Organize your routine!
Before you start organizing your business, you need to focus on your organization. As a leader, you need to set an example for your employees, especially in the areas where you frequently demand results from them.
To improve your productivity, you need to know yourself well and understand what time of day you are most willing to work. Knowing this information, use this period to tackle the most complex tasks on your agenda, avoiding wasting your most productive hours on routine activities.
Another good tip is to write down all your daily tasks. Besides bringing a sense of reward with each completed activity, this exercise will help you focus on specific actions. The night before, you can rank the priorities and arrive at work ready to produce. Just don't try to do more than one thing at a time; you'll finish sooner if you do one task at a time.
2 – Detail how your business works.
Create an organizational chart for the company, detailing the departments and who is responsible for each one. Analyze the processes your business performs and the path these processes take between departments until completion. Who performs each process and what tools are used? Where are the results reports sent? In the end, you should obtain the workflow (or lack thereof) for each company activity.
3 – Eliminate bottlenecks
By understanding the entire workflow, you must analyze each process and identify how they could be performed with higher quality and lower cost. To achieve greater efficiency, you need to think as if you were starting a new company; you can't accept the old story of "this is how it's always been done."
Be prepared to consider whether some processes can be eliminated entirely due to task redundancy. For example, two departments creating similar reports could be grouped together to create a single document shared with everyone.
4 – Manage handoffs
More than just eliminating leftovers, you need to look at interruptions in the workflow, such as projects that stagnate due to slowness in some area, whether due to work overload or poor employee performance. This procedural delay is usually noticed during the handoff – when a task passes from one department to another.
However, while handoffs can cause problems, a lack of task delegation can also harm business efficiency. It's very common for managers to want to concentrate many tasks on themselves, but as the company grows, it's necessary to learn to trust employees. Delegating is the only way to grow.
5 – Chart new paths
All workflow analysis and identification of bottlenecks to be eliminated must lead to a redesign of the company's processes. This means charting new paths, establishing new standards for approving, executing, monitoring, and reviewing tasks.
Therefore, some actions need to be analyzed daily (such as customer problems), while others can be reviewed over months or years (such as business values and strategies). What cannot happen is leaving everything as it is.
6 - Listen to feedback
Good communication with your colleagues helps to streamline processes, generate ideas and strategies, and improve engagement.
Talk to your team about how they view their activities and ask for suggestions on how processes can be improved or reduced in cost. Take the opportunity to encourage them and show them the importance of each individual within the company.
7 – Invest in technology
In most of these tips, it's possible to save time and money by using an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system. Organizing your own activities, sharing tasks, monitoring processes, identifying redundancies, delegating, and gathering feedback: all of this can (and should!) be aided by technology.
Depending on the complexity of the process, it can be resolved with just one click! By optimizing labor and work schedules, more time is freed up for everyone to dedicate to truly challenging and important activities.
Increasing productivity can be simple, provided the right strategies are adopted. And implementing an Enterprise Management System is certainly the most efficient of them all.
*Content inspired by text from the Oracle Brazil blog.
