Tip of the Week: Three Ways to Promote Operational Efficiency

Revenue is a key component of any business, crucial to the continued success and efficacy of it. However, in order to sustain an incoming revenue stream, a business needs to be able to operate efficiently enough to support it. In this week’s tip, we’ll review a few ways that you can build this efficiency in your own operations to assist your efforts to build a prosperous business.

Your business’ operational efficiency is largely in control of the employees who are driving these operations. With the right tools and motivation, there are a few ways you can encourage them to work more efficiently to the benefit of the organization as a whole. They include:

Automation
It only makes sense that allowing a machine to complete a task independently would be the more efficient route to take, as it effectively enables you to accomplish multiple tasks at once. As a result, it won’t be long before any time spent setting up your automated processes is reclaimed through using automation to save time on billing, procurement, business management, or just about any other task you could think of.

Communication
The link between efficiency and communication has been demonstrated definitively--the more effectively your staff can communicate amongst themselves, the more they are able to produce. You need to encourage these kinds of habits, making it clear that face-to-face communication is an option for them if miscommunication over digital means is a concern. Developing communicative habits among your workforce will only help to boost both the quality and speed of what they are accomplishing.

Many people hear the term “communications” and have their minds immediately jump to “meeting.” Meetings have developed a reputation for being time wasters, and if handled improperly, yours could follow suit. However, with brief, communicative meetings held at the beginning of the day, many meetings that would otherwise interrupt a workflow later can be eliminated. With improved communications, your workforce can meet smarter, not more frequently.

Communication can also assist you in rooting out the operational hang-ups that are affecting productivity. Encouraging your employees to bring up any inefficiencies they experience is a great way to leverage communications to assist you in optimizing your internal processes.

Limit Interruptions as Possible
Finally, how often have you found that your communications have actually gotten in the way of your productivity? Are you interrupted every so often by a bing announcing that a message that doesn’t concern you has been delivered, or worse, that a non-work-related app wants your attention?

There are certain applications that allow you to limit notifications of these kinds from delivering during certain hours, so you may consider requiring them as a part of your company’s Bring Your Own Device strategy, or even distributing work devices to your employees if your budget allows for it. The fewer interruptions to the workday there are, the more productive focus can be lent to the task at hand.

For assistance in implementing any of these measures, the staff at Washington Works is here. Give us a call at 301-571-5040 for more assistance.