One of the top challenges facing entrepreneurs today is productivity. It seems there’s never enough time in the day to do all that we need to get done. However, stepping up your productivity game can certainly help you get more done in a day. Being more productive just takes a few simple changes and you’ll be on your way to grow your business quickly and efficiently. Here are seven ways to get started.
1. Have Shorter Meetings
Meetings are notorious for running way too long, getting way off track, and simply taking up too much time. Instead of having your usual hour-long meeting, cut that time in half by standing during meetings (if possible), having specific and singular goals for each meeting, and avoiding meetings that resemble lectures too much. You can also opt to have your meetings later on during the workday since people are most productive at the beginning of the day. Only invite people to the meeting that absolutely need to be there — otherwise, you’re just creating more of a hassle for everyone else involved.
2. Use Better Collaboration Tools
Using the right collaboration tools will help give your business the boost in productivity it needs, and it’ll also make your team want to be more productive. A centralized, user-friendly conference calling platform is a must for maintaining productivity in collaborative workplaces. With this technology, you can schedule a conference call anytime and users can join with the click of a button. They can even join the call on their smartphone. And with features like screen sharing, you can connect with your team and have online meetings from anywhere.
3. Get Management to Behave
If your senior staff can’t model positive, productive behavior, you can’t expect your lower level staff to either. Finding ways to get upper-level staff to be model employees is the first step. Management must lead by example and start being as productive as they can be. When the lower level staff sees this, they’ll know what time it is. That will be the example they need to see in order to become a more productive member of your staff.
4. Track Your Team’s Performance
Tracking your team’s performance is one of the best ways to improve both productivity and performance. Tracking your team’s performance means asking the important questions, such as: Are we retaining customers? Are we spotting the right trends (both negative and positive)? Do we have a lot of no-shows? Is customer service handled in a timely manner? Think about how well your team is performing and if they’re not up to standards, try to find out why and what you can do to change that. Use the same approach you would in tracking your social media and website performance.
5. Set Goals & Priorities
If you set goals and priorities, your team will know exactly where they need to be. They’ll know if they’re putting in enough work, or if they need to step their game up. Once you have target goals and set priorities, there will be no excuse for why your team isn’t hitting their targets. And once you start tracking their performance, you can weed out the team members who aren’t consistently hitting those targets or make any other necessary changes.
6. Give Incentive
Some companies have gotten a bad rap over treating their employees poorly and still expecting to get the best, most productive, most loyal employees to work hard. But that’s not the way the world works. In this world, you have to give to get anything. So, why not give to your employees? After all, a happy employee is a productive employee. Giving your team incentives for being more productive is one route to go. It’s a win-win. You give them a prize for completing sales goals; they knock those sales goals out of the water, surpassing them two-fold! Try incentives and see how well they work when it comes to employee productivity. If you’re just starting out, a small incentive works just fine until you reach the level where you can offer more generous perks and freebies.
7. Outsource What You Can
Whenever you can delegate a task to someone, do it. Outsource jobs you’d normally do yourself and that can also be completed by someone else on your team. This frees you up to focus on the most important tasks of running your business. So, find someone you can trust — may be a personal or virtual assistant — and delegate the tasks you know they can handle. Don’t try to do everything yourself; you’ll only overwork yourself and burn out. Learn to trust others with important tasks that don’t necessarily need you.
Becoming more productive throughout your workday isn’t impossible, as you can see from the above examples. While it may take some maneuvering at first, you’ll get into the swing of things in no time and you’ll be getting much more done in a day than you used to. Use the above information as a starting point and look for ways to be more productive every day.
Source: Entrepreneurship in a box