When running any business, be it small or large, new or well-established, it always pays to keep reviewing business practices and searching for ways to improve efficiency. It can be very easy to float along doing what has always worked without thinking about improvements, especially if the business is making a profit and the customers are happy. However, even the best companies can improve by streamlining operations, and will benefit from taking an overview of how things are done and looking at options for working smarter not harder.
Sharing Important Tasks
Delegation is known to improve not only your own efficiency, but also team morale. If you share important tasks out amongst those supervisors, managers and employees best suited to deal with them rather than taking them all on yourself, you don’t just decrease your own workload, you also give your employees a feeling of empowerment, and the drive to want to complete tasks to the best of their ability. A happy workforce is a productive workforce, and if each worker feels that their particular skill set is valued they will take more pride in getting the job done to a high level.
Company Access
Centralising data for management and employees is another way to increase efficiency almost overnight. Installing a universal system that can be accessed by anyone means that each person is working from the same page. It enables management to communicate with each other quickly and accurately from anywhere, and gives employees access to all the data they require to perform at their best.
Communication
Also in terms of communication, one easy mistake many companies make is segregating the front and back office staff. While the roles of each are certainly different, with front office workers being customer oriented, dealing with sales and marketing, and back office workers focusing on finance, accounts and data tracking, there is a lot to be said for keeping everyone involved with both sides. It is of course not necessary to train every employee to fill every role, but allowing them all access to the same information and keeping the lines of communication open can instil a better team spirit, and allow the two halves of your business to come together and work well as a whole.
Allowing customers to use the internet to conduct any business they may wish that does not require face to face contact can also speed things up. Setting up a great, interactive website that allows some level of self-service will save time for you and the clients also.
Reducing Paperwork
Finally, reducing paperwork saves an immense amount of time. Using direct debit software to handle payments, or introducing automatic data tracking systems will help.
Introducing a cloud-based software package company-wide will provide solutions to all these issues and more in one easy step. It centralises data, keeps everyone in the loop, tracks payments, comes complete with an interactive website, and can be set at various access levels so each worker can see exactly what they need to without encroaching on data protection issues.
This post was brought to you by SchemeServe – insurance broker software.
Image attribution 1|2|3