As a business owner, you’ll want to do anything possible to drive efficiency across all of your operations. All the better for keeping your employees happy and guaranteeing results. But, what if you feel like you’re constantly falling foul of the efficiency levels you’d like to achieve? Perhaps project delivery is always a little slower than predicted, or maybe tasks are too often rolling over to the next day. Over a year, those seemingly small ‘efficiency leaks’ will cost you. But, how do you identify these issues? What exactly are the 3 things you can do to patch those leaks when you find them, you might ask.
By Team Savant
Image: Resume Genius
No 1. Consider Your Worst Time Wasters
Business time wasters that cost each employee even as little as 10 minutes a day can lead to 50 minutes of lost work across the working week for every single employee! Identifying your worst time wasters is, therefore, key to implementing improvements.
Let’s say employees are losing time moving around the office. Could you switch to a more intuitive office design? Or, perhaps inventory management is your problem? If employees have to turn the office upside down every time they need to find something, then bespoke storage solutions to improve office organisation could make a huge difference.
Simply work out where the majority of lost time is going right now, and get to work improving the situation!
No 2. Get Serious About Bottlenecks
Sometimes, you may find that certain operational bottlenecks are holding your team back, even when they’re at their desks and ready to work.
Officially defined as points of congestion that stop the overflow of work, business bottlenecks might include convoluted reporting processes, slow approvals, or outdated systems. In each instance, the results can be catastrophic.
Luckily, bottlenecks are generally easy to identify because they have a verifiable and ongoing impact on your results. Whether order processing or payment is the problem, your analytics will highlight these issues like the business sore thumbs they become. And, once you know where bottlenecks are, processes like automation of manual tasks, or simply updated systems built with speed in mind, can all help to patch those problems.
No 3. Ask the People on the Ground
You might think that people in glass houses have the best view, but managers aren’t always in tune with what’s happening on the business ground. Hence why you should also speak to your employees whenever you’re looking for efficiency leaks.
After all, the people who deal with these problems every day are in the best possible position to not only highlight them but to also tell you why they’re an issue. Let’s say you’ve implemented a customer service script that’s intended to improve processes. Employees are the best people to tell you if this slows things down without necessarily producing results. They may even have a few experience-based suggestions that can both patch efficiency leaks and set actual outputs soaring.
Business efficiency is a balancing act. Make sure you’re not losing weight by leaving these leaks to run riot.