One missed deadline might not seem like too big of a deal to treat it like a red flag in your business. Alas, these seemingly isolated events speak volumes of your company’s organizational efficiency: missed deadlines, overdue invoices, late fees, lost contracts, long coffee breaks. In the post-pandemic era of 2021 and beyond, your company cannot afford these issues, because optimizing your productivity will be the key to your success and stability.
Research has shown that while 89% of employees waste some amount of time at work, the top 10% waste three or more hours every day. That fact alone means that your entire organization is wasting invaluable time and money, when you should instead optimize your business performance to do more in less time.
Add to that, the increasing number of automation tools and other software opportunities makes it all the easier for modern-day companies to evolve and grow. Here’s what you need to know in order to organize your business this year and prime it for success in the years to come.
Set Clear Goals and Milestones
First and foremost, you need to have clear goals for your business, but also for each of your departments in order to improve your company’s overall organizational effectiveness.
- Set SMART goals that have a clear timeframe and all the necessary resources outlined before you start working on accomplishing them.
- Make sure each person in your organization understands their role in achieving these goals.
- Be specific and quantifiable with your goals, so that you can adapt your strategies and make sure to have the needed KPIs assigned to each goal and milestone.
- Ensure feedback exchanges that will elevate your employees’ engagement and their success as well.
Manage Your Resources with Ease
Effective time management is at the core of improving your organizational skills within your business. If you have no idea where some of your employees are, what tasks they are covering, or if the conference room is available that afternoon, you cannot expect to be able to run your business smoothly. It’s common in such instances to have one portion of your staff suffer from burnout, while others have no tasks on their agenda.
To eliminate such issues, companies are increasingly relying on automation to improve employee management. You can even use employee engagement tools to automate collaboration and motivate your employees. From regular check-ins to schedule updates, these tools can offer you a variety of features that can offer you a clear overview of your employees’ workload and track their engagement. Ultimately, you will also be able to use the information from the software to recognize ineffective patterns and improve all processes in each department with better resource allocation.
Automate a Range of Tasks
Now that you have so many digital tools at your disposal, many of them vetted by experts and other businesses, you can seamlessly utilize them to eliminate a slew of tasks off your to-do list. Each department can leverage different automation tools to simplify their processes.
For example, your accounting teams can automate the payroll process as well as recurring invoices for your business partners and clients. The HR team can use automated onboarding chatbots to help assimilate new employees with pre-prepared answers and instructions.
Your marketers can automate audits, testing, as well as social media posting and scheduling. Your IT teams can benefit from automating various processes in order to focus on elevating cybersecurity for your business. The opportunities are endless, it only matters how you leverage them to your advantage.
Structure your Meetings Properly
How often do you fall into that trap of prolonging a meeting for no apparent reason or failing to cover at least one of those essential topics? An important part of improving your business’s organization levels involves how you organize and structure your meetings.
- Build a clear agenda for every meeting, no matter if it’s in the conference room or conducted remotely.
- Set a clear timeframe for your meeting, but also for each topic you need to go over.
- Let your attendees send you emails a few days before each meeting if they want to talk about something specific or address an issue. That way, you can adapt the agenda and the schedule ahead of time.
- Take notes to send follow-up emails with bullet points for everyone to know their goals for the day, or the week.
- Don’t force everyone to be at the meeting, if they’re not essential. Let people get on with their work instead.
- Eliminate distractions, so that you don’t get interrupted every time a phone rings or someone sends you a message.
Establish Clear Processes and Protocols
From day one, your employees need to know what they are supposed to do in each situation. That is why you need a detailed and thorough onboarding process that will help integrate new team members quickly and efficiently, without slowing down your entire organization or bringing your projects to a halt.
Moreover, you need clearly outlined protocols for each position in your organization. A marketing manager needs to know your expectations, but they also need to know the intricacies that their job entails on a daily basis – should they take care of the SEO research themselves, or assign this task to someone else on the team? Should your support agent talk to your sales team in order to provide smarter cross-sell offers and resolve issues more quickly?
These and other potential issues need to be managed without wasting time going in circles, because someone doesn’t know who the right person they should talk to is. Managing expectations and clearly setting the boundaries of everyone’s work can help your teams grow, but also provide them with opportunities to teach one another along the way.
To Summarize
The upcoming period will be challenging for all industries and business leaders, but it’s up to you to maximize your organizational efficiency and make sure your employees have a strong structure to follow. That alone will boost their productivity, provide you the insight into ways you can improve your company, and outline a path towards a more successful future based on strong organizational skills. Use the listed ideas to take your business forward as a whole and grow your organization over time.
