Improving the productivity of small businesses SME is an aspiration of every entrepreneur, manager and manager. We are not as productive as we should be, and we need to improve! Therefore, we offer you eight ideas that you can apply to your company to boost its performance.
Table of Contents
1. Improve Productivity Through Planning and Organization
In the first place, to improve productivity, it is a priority to establish annual, monthly and weekly plans, objectively defining short, medium and long-term goals. In this sense, it is essential to set obvious and achievable objectives that can be achieved in reasonable periods. At the same time, these objectives must be relevant and, obviously, measurable through precise indicators.
Also, it is advisable to define contingency plans for emergencies and unforeseen events that may alter the dynamics of work and the fulfillment of goals. In addition, it is convenient to apply the competency profile in the selection process to anticipate which collaborators could replace the possible absences of others.
2. Give Each Task The Proper Priority.
On many occasions, entrepreneurs and managers fall into the trap of spending a lot of time and resources on tasks that are not relevant to achieving their goals. Of course, this does nothing to improve productivity; on the contrary, it produces losses.
Consequently, to avoid this mistake, you must define the tasks according to the proposed goals and fulfill them within the established deadlines with the help of digital marketing.
Meet deadlines to improve productivity
Likewise, sometimes unrealistic delivery times are set with the intention of wanting to impress or attracting a client. So we often put our team members on the hook to meet these urgencies and neglect larger goals.
Therefore, it is essential to avoid management by emergencies rather than by objectives. This does not mean avoiding eventual and necessary challenges to obtain benefits but knowing how to negotiate a good term with the client. It is even feasible to dedicate the strictly required personnel and resources to such projects.
3. Delegate Tasks Essential To Improving Productivity
Indeed, the most effective key to management is knowing how to delegate functions to the right collaborators. We often believe that most of our team members are not trained to perform very complex activities or make crucial decisions. For this reason, we “reserve” a lot of tasks and resolutions that accumulate and end up causing us stress and overload.
Before, we recommended the need to define competencies during selection and hiring. But, it is also convenient, as a team leader, to test the skills of your most proactive and compliant employees.
You can assign them more demanding responsibilities frequently and evaluate their performance. In this way, you motivate them and push them to improve productivity.
Also Read: How To Become a Digital Entrepreneur in Times of Crisis
4. If You Want To Improve Productivity, Make Your Meetings Shorter.
Undoubtedly, meetings with the team are essential, but they must have the appropriate frequency and duration. Following this, the plan must be established and made known to all the participants before each meeting.
Likewise, it is advisable to be assertive and concise when defining objectives, assigning tasks and making pertinent observations. Similarly, it is essential to get to the point, avoiding hesitation and irrelevant speeches. It is also necessary to open space for questions and resolve doubts.
5. Employ Solutions For Teamwork
Indeed, there are many excellent options for applications to manage work teams in the cloud.
With this type of productivity solution, it is easier to monitor the execution of projects by collaborators. Additionally, it is feasible to make adjustments and communicate with each worker or group anywhere.
6. Motivating Staff is a Priority To Improve Productivity.
The human talent motivation policy must be an essential part of the efforts to improve productivity. In short, incentive management needs to be consistent and coordinated. Isolated and sporadic actions do not generate the confidence and enthusiasm that you need from your collaborators.
Beyond the financial aspects, creativity is required to keep employees motivated. Based on this, we give you some ideas for this objective.
Ideas to motivate the team
- Training and constant updating of your staff in each of their areas.
- As we said before, try assigning more demanding tasks to the collaborators with the most significant potential. To the extent possible, promote them to a higher position.
- Likewise, work-life balance and flexible hours are part of the requests most requested by professionals.
- Investigate and implement salary compensation measures adapted to your company’s capacity—for example, food coupons, transportation, and purchases with discounts, among others.
7. Propose New Products and Services, Another Way To Improve Productivity
Sometimes it is convenient to leave the comfort zone to improve productivity, and this implies daring to design and offer innovative products and services, increasingly personalized.
In this sense, it is necessary to allocate a part of the annual budget to research. Through it, you will be able to develop viable proposals that can have an exciting impact on your results.
Likewise, we recommend launching product prototypes and measuring their acceptance using the lean startup methodology. A fair dose of audacity always comes in handy so as not to stagnate as an entrepreneur.
8. Undertake Digital Transformation For Better Productivity
Finally, moving towards the technological conversion of your company is one of the most decisive steps to improve productivity. And we’re not just talking about next-generation devices. And it is also about learning about and adopting cloud solutions and services that streamline routine processes. All this will allow allocating more resources to the most profitable activities of the business.
So far, you can see that your company’s productivity does not depend solely on external factors. These eight recommendations that we address are aspects that can be controlled and monitored internally in your SME.
