Start Pill
The average employee is distracted every three minutes. And while some of that can be attributed to human nature, a lot of it has to do with whether your company puts the team in a position to perform consistently and with minimal disruptions to their flow.
As an employer, there are countless ways to help your employees become more efficient. Most of the core processes your company needs to operate can likely be improved with technology or by automating specific tasks.
To help you find ways to optimize processes in the workplace and help your team achieve more each day, here are four effective strategies you could consider.
Start Off on the Right Foot
Your employees are the most receptive to new ways of doing things when they first start working for your company. That’s because they come with a willing attitude to learn how your company operates and can quickly develop routines that they stick to for the duration of their employment.
And that means you need to be very deliberate about how you onboard your employees and guide them through what they’ll need to do. Luckily, you can rely on onboarding software for small businesses to streamline the entire process and leverage the best practices used by leading organizations today.
The right onboarding solution will also allow you to develop a consistent onboarding process that will ensure everyone who enters your organization will be up to speed and accountable from day one. Whether you need to onboard one or 100 employees, a good onboarding tool will make scaling the process easier than otherwise possible.
Empower Your Team to Be More Independent
Another effective way of boosting the way your team operates is to provide easy access to the information your team needs to solve problems. It will instantly solve one of the biggest bottlenecks most organizations face: not being able to share knowledge fast enough and wasting a lot of time in needless back-and-forth.
By developing an internal wiki your team can access at all times, you’ll have a consistent library that outlines processes, best practices, solutions, progress reports, and anything else your team might need as they move through their tasks.
Today, having a centralized database of information is easier than ever, as you can leverage powerful tools that make it easy to organize large amounts of data into sortable, searchable, and quickly expandable bits.
When you have such a database available for your team, they will be much more likely to seek and find answers themselves, dramatically cutting the time it would take to solve the problem or move through the obstacle otherwise.
Streamline Communications
One of the most impactful ways technology can improve your work processes is by making communication easier. There are countless tools designed to reduce back-and-forth, provide instant access to any team member, and enable everyone to know exactly what needs to be done through comprehensive project tracking.
For example, by implementing a tool like Slack, you can dramatically cut down the time it takes for people on your team to share information and get quick answers to questions. It’s also very easy to set up group chats based on projects, different teams, or any other relevant way to get work done faster. Slack also seamlessly integrates with other tools like Asana or Trello, allowing your team to keep track of projects in one place.
Another helpful communication tool that can remove a lot of bottlenecks is a video conferencing solution like Zoom or Google Meet. With 97% of remote employees aiming to work remotely in the future, organizations must be willing to provide alternative ways of communication, and video conferencing helps bridge the gap between in-office and remote workers, allowing for more direct communication through a convenient on-demand platform.
Aim to Solve Specific Problems
There are countless ways to solve productivity issues by improving how your team operates. But the sheer number of available opportunities can quickly become overwhelming, which causes many leaders to become distracted or prioritize solutions that may not be the most relevant in the current situation.
That’s why before making any changes, it’s a good idea to step back and figure out the biggest problems you could address right now.
By talking to your team and analyzing performance, you can identify the problems that are stifling progress and forcing your team to spend a significant part of their time on unproductive activities. You can also find out the biggest frustrations your team is facing and address them in a way that boosts office morale.
Once you know a problem you want to solve, finding the best solutions will become much easier, as you can evaluate the selection of options based on strict criteria that apply to you and no one else.
Bottom Line
Improving productivity within your company is one of the easiest and most affordable ways to dramatically boost your revenue and growth potential. And the good news is that the technology available today allows even small businesses to empower each employee to be more productive.
The important thing to remember is that no matter what method or tool you use, you should evaluate its suitability by identifying the specific problems you want to solve.
