Organizing the workflow is essential to any company’s success. You cannot expect your employees to perform at their best if you do not set clear goals and provide thorough instructions.
In this article, you will learn a few small business organization strategies you can apply right now.
Outsource Menial Tasks to Virtual Assistants
Have you ever wished to have an in-house assistant but could not afford to hire one? Repetitive, manual tasks suck the energy out of your staff. However, they are often essential to your business performance. For small businesses with limited resources, hiring a virtual assistant can be the right solution to this problem.
Virtual assistants are self-employed workers who work remotely. They have the industry experience and tools needed to meet your business demands. Since they are independent contractors, their services are often more affordable than hiring full-time staff.
Most importantly, virtual assistants can perform various tasks, from after-hours answer service to accounting.
Develop Corporate Protocols and Procedures
What happens if a sales manager signs a major client or an employee experiences a cybersecurity breach? How do they report such events?
If you cannot answer these questions right now, that may mean your company lacks protocols. Those are the sets of rules that allow your employees to communicate with peers and managers. They determine how a policy is carried out.
For starters, identify the business area that requires having a clear policy. Understand its goal, such as increasing productivity or preventing employee conflict.
Design the protocol and document it step-by-step. Make sure it is easy to understand. Next, create a test group of employees and have them put the procedure through a trial run.
Finally, identify any problems your test group faces and resolve them before submitting the protocol to the management for approval.
Manage your Office Space
While optimizing your digital workspaces, you should not neglect the importance of your physical surroundings. They directly impact employee satisfaction and performance. That is why you should keep them neat and organized.
Make sure every item has a specific place. Keep in mind that paperwork consumes a lot of resources and room in modern offices. That is why you should consider storing it offsite.
Alternatively, go paperless. By digitizing your company’s documents, you will reduce the clutter and manage your workload more effectively. Shifting to cloud-based document storage, you will make your essential business documents easier to find. Most importantly, they will be available to your team members 24/7, irrespective of their locations.
Boost Productivity by Switching to the Cloud
Cloud tools can enhance employee communication, collaboration, and productivity. Here are a few software solutions that may boost business almost instantly.
Password Managers
Your employees use a wide range of tools. They have several tactics for remembering and managing passwords. While some use the same password for different tools, others create unique passwords (and often forget them).
Fortunately, there is an app that handles passwords for you. Password managers are cloud-based tools that store your passwords together in mobile and desktop apps. Therefore, employees can access their accounts effortlessly, regardless of their devices and locations.
Project Management Tools
They help project managers stay on top of their projects. Managers can easily create new projects, add the right team members, and assign tasks to each employee. Most importantly, they can track employee performance and measure project completion in real-time.
Employees, on the other hand, use these tools to track their tasks. Most importantly, they can share files, access relevant documents, and communicate 24/7.
Accounting Tools
Whether you hire an in-house or freelance accountant, managing business finances is one of the most complicated tasks. It is time-consuming and requires lots of paperwork. As such, it is prone to errors.
To optimize your accounting efforts, consider investing in accounting software, such as QuickBooks or Xero. With these software solutions, you can monitor cash flow, take payments, and automate invoicing.
Contact Management Software
Managing qualified leads, customers, and recent payments can be tedious when done manually. If you do not collect and store customer information proactively, you may lose leads and compromise customer experiences.
That is where investing in a contact management solution helps. CRM software integrates with a wide range of sales, marketing, and customer service tools. It collects customer data from multiple locations and creates profiles for each customer. That is where your team can find users’ previous purchases, customer service inquiries, feedback, abandoned purchases, etc. By accessing this data in real-time, they can provide customers with highly personalized experiences.
Build an Organizational System that Works
Adopting a completely new workflow would eat up a lot of your time and resources. That is why you should consider revamping the existing one. Analyze your business operations to see what works or not. Based on the insights you gain, identify business areas that need help.
Above all, remember that there is no one-size-fits-all strategy for optimizing your workflow. Experiment with the tips we mentioned above until you find the tactic that works for you.
How do you improve your company’s organization? Please, share your thoughts with us!
Eve Anderson is a marketing specialist turned blogger. Interested in sports and exciting travel destinations. Love to share content that can inform people.