The Right Mindset for Increasing Your Company’s Efficiency
A business can’t be profitable if it can’t accomplish the necessary tasks in a timely fashion. Unfortunately, there can be a number of obstacles along the way, ranging from employee motivation to having the wrong tools for the job to poor communication. Working efficiently is key to profitability, but first, you must understand your company’s needs.
Employee Buy-In
One point to keep in mind is that while efficiency is an important thing, it’s not the only thing. Any innovations that you implement should be done in tandem with your employees. Just as working an enormous number of hours eventually results in diminishing returns, there is a limit to how much efficiency you can harness. When you are trying to determine what improvements are needed, talk to your employees first. They may have insights about the tools that would be most helpful to them in doing their jobs that would not have occurred to you simply because you aren’t dealing with the same issues day in and day out.
The Right Tools
We can look at an area like fleet management to better understand how to make systems more efficient. One of the best ways to improve your fleet’s performance is with vehicle telematics. Technology that does far more than GPS tracking can deliver valuable data on your drivers and vehicles. Vehicle telematics can identify fuel waste, inefficient driving practices and other problems. You can keep an eye on this data and make adjustments accordingly as well as ensuring that your vehicles are maintained regularly and your drivers’ schedules allow for adequate rest and safety measures.
Better Culture of Communication
There’s a running joke in the business world about meetings that could have been an email, but it’s a running joke because it’s true. However, as you know all too well if you’re also someone who deals with a busy inbox as part of your job, email is not really the right solution either. Not only does its constant arrival throughout the day threaten to pull you off the tasks you need to accomplish or just distract you, but it also takes time to read and respond. There really ought to be a companion joke about an extended email exchange that could have been a 30-second phone call.
Within your organization, you can encourage everyone to think more carefully about the information that they need to communicate and how it would best be conveyed. Is it timely? Is it something that benefits from everyone being united in a brainstorming session, or is it simply an update that could be easily sent out to everyone to read at their leisure?
In addition, you could encourage better time management when it comes to dealing with communication. For example, you might have areas in the office where people could go if they need to work interruption-free. This is a way to show you care about your employees and that you are not just simply suggesting things with no follow through. You could also conduct trainings that teach people how to deal with email, text, and other types of messages more efficiently. For example, some people set aside small blocks of time throughout the day to address these messages so they aren’t facing constant interruptions.