Productivity is something we all know is important, but is your team doing enough to prioritize it? If you don’t have the right infrastructure, processes, and technology in place, the answer is no.
Helpful Tactics for Enhancing Productivity
Productivity is a measure of effort, efficiency, and results all wrapped up into one neat package. It’s a metric by which managers and business owners can measure success over a period of time. It’s the driving force behind successful businesses. And it’s up to a company’s leadership to put systems, processes, and people in place to incrementally increase productivity over time and ensure the business is moving in the right direction.
Not sure where to start with improving your team’s productivity? Here are a few ideas:
Automate With IT Help Desk and Other Software
Automation can potentially change the game for your business. While it may come with some learning curve, investing in automation software can help you maximize your employees’ time and boost productivity.
IT help desk software, for example, can help you easily capture, triage, and address support tickets with minimal employee involvement. And when a team member is needed, the response is much faster and more efficient due to the streamlined way in which the ticket is managed.
Other examples of tasks that can be automated and streamlined with automation include invoicing, payroll, marketing, call routing, and accounting.
Eliminate Time-Wasting Activities
Every organization has time-wasting activities that eat away at the schedule and limit the output and effectiveness of key team members. If you want to maximize productivity, you must identify and neutralize them. Here are a couple of examples:
- Meetings. Research shows that the average employee spends four hours preparing for and attending meetings per week. (That’s 10 percent of their entire workweek.) And, in many cases, these meetings could be avoided in the first place. When planning meetings, think more strategically. For starters, create a fixed time limit of just 15 to 30 minutes. Secondly, only invite people who are absolutely critical to the meeting (capping invitees at a maximum of five individuals). Thirdly, start precisely on time and avoid all small talk or any chatter that doesn’t directly contribute to the purpose of the meeting.
- Email. Did you know that an average of 28 percent of an employee’s total work time is spent checking, reading, and replying to emails? Like with meetings, much of this time is totally unproductive. We recommend switching to a more efficient and less distracting form of internal communication, such as an application like Slack. And when it comes to external email, employees are encouraged to set specific blocks of time aside for email (and to log out of their accounts outside of these times).
The average team can free up several hours per day just by addressing meetings and email. Think about it like this: What if, by reducing the number of meetings and streamlining email inbox management, you could eliminate 60 minutes of wasted time per employee per day? For a team of 25 people, that’s 25 hours per day, 125 hours per week, and 500 hours of time saved per month. Imagine what your team could accomplish with an extra 500 hours of availability each month!
Delegate and Outsource
You only have so much time in a day. In fact, time is one of the few definitive limiting factors facing you and your team. No matter how much you try, you can’t stretch or expand time. You can, however, learn how to do more within a limited window of time by intelligently tapping the right resources. More specifically, you should embrace the art of delegating and outsourcing.
Through proper delegation, you can free up time in your daily schedule to focus on the most important tasks and critical responsibilities. (And if you learn how to delegate effectively, you can achieve the same quality of output in a faster and more cost-effective manner.)
Outsourcing is another option you have for effectively moving “beyond” time and getting more done within a specific period of time. The beauty of outsourcing is that you can find other partners who are skilled in areas where your team is inexperienced or weak. And in many cases, you can complete the project or task less expensively than if you were to hire a full-time employee to handle it.
Putting it All Together
There’s no singular way to enhance productivity. It’s a team effort – a combination of efforts and strategic discipline. Hopefully, this article has given you a few ideas you can use to begin increasing efficiency and output within your own organization. Good luck!
