Time Saving Tips for Small and Medium Sized Businesses
In business, as the saying goes, time is money. But if you’ve got a small or medium-sized business, you know that it means so much more. For you, business productivity means keeping your clients’ satisfied, staying at the forefront of market trends, and competing with larger companies. The fact is, SMBs don’t have the luxury to waste any of their precious resources, and there’s none more precious than time.
So to help you maximize productivity, boost efficiency and cut down on waste, here are some useful time-saving tips for small and medium-sized businesses.
Define Clear Goals
One of the biggest time-wasters in any business is miscommunication. When team members are not 100% clear on short-term projects or long-term goals, they can often face rework — or having to completely undertake a project for the second time (after doing it incorrectly the first time). To reduce the incidence of rework, your organization should make sure to have clearly defined goals, both on the micro and macro level. Clear communication could mean anything from implementing a centralized project management service, to checking in with employees at each step of a particular project.
Set Hard Deadlines
Deadlines are an important small business tool that can help any company motivate their team to work faster and more efficiently. When we’re up against a hard deadline, we have a natural tendency to dispose of distractions and get work done. Be sure to set realistic deadlines, otherwise your staff might become overwhelmed, which can lead to less-than-perfect results.
Take Breaks
It might seem counterintuitive, but giving yourself and your teammates regular breaks is another important time-saving tip. Having a bit of time to unwind, decompress and refresh oneself is vital to working faster and more productively. Overworking yourself or your teammates is a perfect recipe for burnout, which could lead to extended unproductive periods or worse yet — faster turnover of employees.
Less Meetings
Don’t get us wrong, meetings can be a very effective small business tool for getting everyone on the same page, assessing the state of your company, and solidifying strategy. But oftentimes, meetings can be a useless time-killer, filled with endless jargon and self-serving speeches. If you find that some of your meetings are producing less results than the time you spend in them, it might be beneficial to cut down their frequency.
Limit Multitasking
Studies have shown that only 1-2% of people possess the actual ability to multitask. Most of us attempting to handle seven tasks at once, often do so at the expense of quality in our work. Make sure to tell your team that unless they are totally comfortable multitasking, that they should be focusing completely on one task at a time, completing it to its fullest extent, and move on to the next task.
Go Paperless
There are many software tools out there designed to help your organization save time and increase business productivity. One of the best of these is eSignature. Incorporating an eSignature platform into your company culture helps you reduce waste in a myriad of ways: instant client communications, faster interoffice communication, plus efficient data storage that eliminates the time spent organizing your documents. And there’s no better eSignature platform than OP.Sign.
OP.Sign lets small and medium-sized businesses scan, send and receive their most important documents, all backed up by state-of-the-art cybersecurity. Developed by the team that created the first antivirus software for mobile devices, OP.Sign is your trusted source for cutting-edge encryption, for peace of mind, in a fraction of the time. To get started with OP.Sign, visit op.today or download our app on the Apple App Store or Google Play Store.