Improving productivity is a common goal for most company owners and managers. If you can get more from your employees without having to work them harder or longer, your business can continue to grow. However, it’s not always easy to determine how you should go about getting better productivity.
One area you can focus on is how you organize your business. If you can make things a little more organized, your employees will be able to perform their tasks with less friction and complete them sooner. With that in mind, below are some easy ways to organize your company. The end result is improved productivity throughout your organization.
Interconnect Your Devices
A good place to start is by interconnecting all of the different devices that your company uses. It’s likely that you’re relying on devices such as laptops, tablets, mobile phones, printers, fax machines, and more. If these devices can’t easily connect to one another, you’re probably wasting a lot of time and making things more difficult for your employees.
One easy way to connect your devices is by making use of cloud services. With cloud services, each device connects to the internet, where it can upload and download files. You can then upload a file from one device and access it on all the others.
Another option is connecting devices to your office’s local area network. For example, you can get an office printer that connects to the internet. This way, all of the devices connected to your office’s internet can easily send documents to the printer without having to have a hard-wired connection. Most modern devices are capable of these connections. By setting them up now, you can make things a lot easier for yourself and your employees.
Implement the Right Software
Just as it’s important to have the right equipment, it’s important that you have the right software as well. There are software applications for practically every need these days and making use of the right applications can save your organization a lot of time. A good place to start is by thinking about which tasks currently take your team the most time, then exploring software options that can help reduce the amount of time spent on these tasks.
For example, let’s say your organization makes use of freelancers. Right now, you spend a lot of time interacting with these freelancers individually, doing tasks such as sending out assignments and tracking your payments to them. With contractor management software, you could easily manage your freelancer-related tasks all in one location. Similar software solutions can be found for all sorts of situations. Explore communication software, project management software, and time management software options to get you started.
Create an Employee Handbook
One common cause of a lack of productivity is that your employees aren’t acting in unison. This could mean little things like they are sharing files using different methods, not uploading projects the same way, or not filling out expense reports properly. All of these little digressions have a cumulative effect and can greatly reduce your organization’s productivity. One possible solution is to create an employee handbook.
With an employee handbook, you detail how you want your employees to perform certain tasks. For example, you might describe how employees should name different files or where they should save them. This way, everyone uses the same naming convention and knows where to find the files they need. By detailing the process you want your employees to use in a comprehensive document, you ensure that each employee knows what to do in different situations. From there, it’s just a matter of following up and ensuring your employees are sticking to the stated guidelines.
Use a Communication Schedule
Finally, a communication schedule can help to ensure that your employees are all interacting on time. A communication schedule details when employees should interact with one another and your customers, along with how they should communicate. For example, in a communication schedule, you might list that employees should provide project updates via Slack every Monday morning, and send clients updates via email at the end of every month.
Using a communication schedule helps to ensure that everyone is on the same page and eliminates the problems that arise from a lack of communication. Take some time to think about how you want your employees to interact in every possible situation. Once you’ve done that, create a communication plan and share it with your team. You may need to adjust this document over time. Nevertheless, by creating a plan that everyone can see, you’ll greatly improve the communication within your organization and your productivity as a result.
Start Focusing on Your Company Organization
Good organization is the key to long-term productivity. If you can set up systems that keep everything organized, your team will have a much easier time getting their work done and you’ll likely experience fewer mistakes. Creating organizational systems for your company can take some time but the long-term benefits are worth it. Start with some of the suggestions above and you’ll most likely notice an increase in productivity before long.