How To Make Your Small Business More Efficient
by Sumona Small Business 11 November 2022
As a small business owner, you know the importance of getting priority tasks done as efficiently as possible.
One slow-moving part can hold up the rest, and the bottom line is inefficient workflows cost you money unnecessarily.
Use the tips below to help keep your operations running as seamlessly as possible.
Top 5 Ways To Make Your Small Business More Efficient
1. Automate Wherever Possible
From software that invoices clients to setting up mobile shredders on a regular service schedule to ensure that your sensitive documents are routinely destroyed, automate as many mundane tasks as you can – especially those that pull time, energy and focus away from business activities that actually make you money, like sales calls and responding to customer emails.
2. Encourage Your Team To Use the Most Efficient Communication Method
We all got used to sending Slack messages and emails during the pandemic, but they may not be the most effective medium to communicate with, depending on the type of conversation.
For example, shooting a quick email or slack message is right for one-question, one-answer dialogues, but if a conversation requires back and forth and/or explanations, then face-to-face talks or phone conversations are much more efficient and don’t depend on waiting for people to respond for the conversation to continue.
3. Limit Stand Ups/Huddle Ups to No More Than 10 Mins
Put a time limit on your daily meetings in proportion to the number of employees attending so that anyone taking the floor will have to speak quickly and prioritize their messages.
This allows your team to connect and get on the same page without draining them of valuable energy and momentum during the most crucial part of the day. Creating a sense of urgency during the meeting can also send your team off at the right pace to tackle their mornings.
4. Remove Interruptions
It’s always a good idea to revisit how many of your meetings are actually necessary and who exactly needs to be there. If you have a daily meeting followed by a weekly team meeting, followed by a weekly department meeting, and the information gets less personally relevant with each ascending meeting level, consider doing bi-weekly or monthly meetings.
How many of your staff are in meetings just to “be in the loop” of information that could have been sent in an email?
However, it’s important to also reduce the number of emails and chats to a minimum as well – especially if those conversations would end a lot sooner if they were face-to-face. (See above)
5. Encourage Staff to Focus on Completing One Task at a Time
The idea of multitasking may make us feel like we’re getting more done in less time; however, it’s likely that we aren’t saving time; we’re just taking more time to complete a single task. The term multitasking itself is misleading; we are more accurately “task-switching.”
While you may think you’re doing two things at once, what you’re really doing is moving between tasks really quickly. And the more you do that, the longer it takes to complete anything, which is not only unproductive but is psychologically de-motivating as well.
Meanwhile, the opposite is true of focusing on a task until it’s complete. That sense of accomplishment encourages us to keep the momentum going and knock off as many tasks on our lists as possible.
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