Efficiency is the act of being productive while still saving time. It’s something that every business owner is trying to fine-tune at every corner they turn. Whether you are running a contact center with hundreds of employees or a small business with fewer than a dozen, ensuring efficiency is about a handful of simple components.
Do Not Be Afraid To Outsource or Delegate
As obvious as it sounds, this can be one of the more difficult components to put into practice. Because you’ve grown accustomed to doing everything yourself, relinquishing duties to a third party or to one of your employees is not an easy thing to do. But this is partly to do with making sure that you trust your employees or your third parties. Sometimes, the choice is not ours, and when we are working to make sure that we have machinery or technology up to code, it is vital to work with a third party inspection company or IT specialist that will naturally do a better job than asked. It’s about making sure that you trust them.
Clear and Focused Goals
The key to ensuring efficiency is a clearly defined goal that is actually viable. Making the assignments clear and narrow will help them achieve their goals. If you do not define your goal, productivity will decrease. You can incorporate the “SMART” approach, ensuring the goals are specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timely. When an employee knows what is expected of them, but also understands the impact of doing this assignment, this can be a great motivator to ensure efficiency and focus.
Effective Communication
If you are a leader who does not know communication is the defining key to a productive workforce, now is the time to learn this. Technology has allowed us to keep in contact with each other, but this doesn’t always help the message get through. There are so many different ways for us to communicate, that we can become bound by the medium rather than the message. For example, sending an email can take up to 28% of an employee’s time, and can be the second most time-consuming activity after the person’s job itself. In which case, if there is something little to communicate, do you need to do it by email? There are other things you can do to make emails more efficient, such as voice dictation, but you have to rely on a wide variety of tools to settle a matter quickly.
The Importance of the Bigger Picture
It is a constant battle that we can engage with. But the importance of bigger picture thinking is vital, not just for you, but for your employees as well. Things that seem inefficient may prove to be an advantage over time. This is especially true with investing in new technologies. Putting the cash injection into something like automation can be a headache right now, but can be invaluable in a couple of months’ time.
Efficiency is a simple thing to achieve, just as long as we know what we actually need to achieve.