If, your SME, is wasting time and effort it needs to stop. As all its doing is eating into your profits and sapping the motivation of your staff. Luckily, there are some ways that you can make your company, its employees, and its system more productive. Read on to find out what they are.
Digitize those documents
In this digital age, too many companies are still using paper filing systems for their critical documents. This is a terrible idea because paper filing systems are so ineffective, time-consuming and vulnerable to human error. Making finding the thing you need a nightmare, and wasting time in the process.
The solution, of course, is to digitize said documents. Although some companies are resistant to this because of the time, it would take away from other projects. Luckily if you use a service like this
local document imaging company
, they can do all the hard work for you. Even down to removing the staples in the files so you know every page will get scanned. Then you end up with a digitized filing system that saves space and time. Something that can help you improve productivity and reduce wastage.
Review your processes
It is also essential
and processes to improve productivity. This is very easy to do if you run an assembly line type operation, as each section will be already clearly mapped out, so skipping unnecessary steps will be obvious. However, even those roles that have nothing to do with production lines can use this concept to improve what they are doing. All they have to do is create a flow chart of each task that they do. These will then show if certain things are taking up an inordinate amount of time, can be grouped together for better productivity, or can be cut out altogether. In this way, you can make day to day productively much more efficient. Something that will also aid motivation as well. After all who doesn't want to work less and get more done?
Deal with absenteeism
Absenteeism is something that can seriously affect productivity in your businesses. People off
can throw a serious spanner in the works because they cause delays and add extra work to others. Making it hard to retain the same level of productivity that you had before and negatively affecting motivation. To deal with this, there are a few approaches you can take. The first is to look at your company's working practices. Are you asking too much of your employees causing them to become stressed and run down? This is often the case if there is a culture of unpaid overtime where people stay at work, not because there is an urgent project but just because it's the done thing. Lead from the front with this one and ensure that you and your employees all leave at a regular and decent time every day. Something else worth looking at is time management during work hours. As it may be helpful to encourage techniques like Pomodoro. Where the tight focus is to encourage for a short time, interspersed with a quick break to refresh and help refocus. Something that is known to have a positive effect on productivity.
