There’s a lot of impenetrable talk about it, but very simply improving productivity is a direct route to increasing your capacity, leveraging opportunities for growth, or improving your financial bottom line. If you haven’t considered how you could improve the productivity in your own business you could be missing a trick!
To help you on your way we have 4 simple tips for productivity improvement that you can implement now.
Let’s get going on how you can improve…
Stick to what you do best! Whilst it is alway tempting to expand your offerings in a hope of gaining an extra bit of market space it’s generally much better to hone in on a few core products, skills or services and deliver those excellently. By diluting your efforts you make a lot of extra support work, reduce your efficiency and potentially reduce your service levels on the things you really care about.
Think like your customers…What is it that you do that your customers are paying you for? What is of real value to them? This is what you want to spend the vast majority of your time doing. Some of the rest is necessary, like doing your accounts (you can’t avoid those no matter what!) and some is just “waste”. Identifying which is which and focusing on customer value is the hallmark of a productive business.
Don’t Duplicate! This one sounds so obvious but it can slip through the gaps very easily. It applies to everything and is a good rule of thumb to challenge yourself on processes and even team structure. Are you doing something you’ve already done somewhere else? Are you inputting the same data twice? Do you need to add another person doing the same job to your team or could you structure it differently to be more efficient?
Consider every minute…A minute seems such a short amount of time. A minute can’t matter, can it? Well, for your business it can. Consider this: 1 minute the hour is 1/60 of your available time. Over the course of a year that’s around 4 working person days lost. On a £25k salary that’s costing you £500 per person. Now it sounds worth considering, doesn’t it? The message here is small improvements add up to big wins where productivity is concerned!
Getting expert support to improve productivity is an investment that pays for itself – usually very quickly!
