Working Smarter: Strategies for Boosting Your Business Productivity

An average office worker is productive for less than three hours per day. And that’s a reality that scares many business owners who aren’t getting the results they need.

But at the same time, it can also be considered an opportunity. If you can help your employees get more out of the time they have available, you can dramatically boost business performance and separate your company from the competition.

However, for that to happen, you must be willing to invest in processes and technology that can revamp how your company operates and free up time for more productive activities.

Let’s explore a few ways of making that happen below.

Systemize Business Communications

Communication, in a nutshell, is a core part of running a business. And that includes both communications between employees and those that happen with clients and customers.

And one of the biggest differentiators of highly productive and professional businesses is the implementation of templates that allow for a more standardized way of presenting information.

When you implement documents such as a business proposal template and refine it to suit your business needs, you can eliminate guesswork for how you communicate your offer to clients, significantly reducing the time it takes for team members to put it together.

A well-crafted proposal template will also make it much easier to emphasize the main benefits of working with your company and ensure that all of the essential information is included and the client can feel more secure about committing. 

Create a Knowledge Base

A big part of running a successful business is ensuring that the knowledge you collect and the best practices you develop don’t get lost over time. But with employee turnaround, maintaining the best practices and keeping your team up to date on how to approach tasks is a big challenge.

Therefore, if you want to avoid wasting countless hours training and guiding employees, the only solution is to create a knowledge base using a solution like Document360. It makes it easy to systemize guides, technical docs, FAQs, internal practice documentation, procedures documentation, and everything else your company might need in one place.

Once you start compiling the list of documents in the knowledge base, your team can use it as a guide when taking on an unfamiliar task or trying to learn a new skill. Every time someone can get the information themselves instead of asking for help, your company saves time. In addition, the more experienced staff members can use it on their main activities instead of teaching others. And that can make a massive difference to how productive the company can be.

At the same time, you can also use the knowledge base as a customer support tool, allowing your support team to help more people by directing them to helpful articles instead of explaining the solution each time.

Spend Less Time in Meetings

Meetings can be a black hole that sucks up time and puts a big dent in the productivity potential within your company. That’s why smart companies are trying to minimize the number of meetings that take place, which is a goal strongly encouraged by respected publications such as the Harvard Business Review.

But unfortunately, cutting back on meetings isn’t always easy, especially if you’ve already fallen into the habit of discussing every little decision with the team. The good news is that, at the same time, cutting back on meetings and replacing them with emails and briefings can have a massive impact on how much you can boost productivity. 

While eliminating meetings completely is not possible, they should be reserved for reviewing bigger events and setting the course. After that, meetings can be kept small, and other people can remain in the loop by receiving an update on progress and what was discussed.

Automate Tasks

Workflow automation is one of the hottest buzzwords in the business world. Companies of all sizes are discovering how transformational automating daily tasks can be, as it frees up a ton of time for employees and drives growth through a boost in productivity and a focus on solving problems.

But a big problem when implementing these types of solutions is finding the right set of tools that can enhance performance instead of becoming a disruption. Just because a tool or a software solution is available doesn’t mean it’s right for you, and it might turn out to be more trouble than it’s worth.

Therefore, you should approach workflow automation from the perspective of solving problems. If you identify a task or problem that wastes a lot of time for your employees, that’s a good starting point for looking into potential opportunities in terms of software that could address that.

Then, you can compare different solutions with the end goal in mind and eliminate the ones with too many features, which can result in savings and better implementation.

Bottom Line

Boosting productivity in the workplace is a challenge. But if you take it one step at a time and focus on implementing the correct practices, the minor improvements will compound into significant changes over a more extended period.

By creating a system for communicating with clients, building a knowledge base, and automating tasks, you can free up more time and put your employees in a position to succeed.