Why productivity is the key to all business success stories
Love to achieve more in less time. Find out why productivity is the key to all business success stories – and how you can be more productive.
As a business owner, you should always be looking for ways to minimize wasted time and resources, stay focused on your goals, and optimize your business processes. Achieving and maintaining high levels of productivity is essential to running a successful business.
Why is productivity so important to business success?
Productivity is key to a business’s success in so many different ways – it helps increase profitability, it lowers operating costs, and optimizes your resources. It’s especially important to businesses trying to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic.
When businesses aren’t wasting time and resources unnecessarily they’re in a much better position to grow and expand, and it also gives them more of a competitive edge.
Productivity also helps you to provide a better service to clients and customers, and they can see that your business operates successfully. Plus when there’s a productive work ethic, your employees will feel more invested in your business and it reduces any stress or frustration with their jobs.
How can you be more productive?
Increasing productivity doesn’t just happen overnight because you decide you’re going to get more done in the same amount of time. You need to take steps towards more productive ways of working.
Here are three ways you can be more productive.
1) Break projects down into smaller tasks
It’s a lot easier to track your progress through projects if you aren’t just looking at the big picture of whether it’s finished or not. Take your projects and break them into smaller stages, with a goal and timeframe for each stage.
Having smaller, more achievable goals to work towards is a lot more motivating, than working on something day after day and not being able to tell if you’ve made any real progress.
You can then break these smaller goals into tasks and actions that are required, which can be assigned to different team members so that everyone is clear about exactly what they should be working on.
To keep on top of your progress it’s a good idea to use task management software such as GetBusy. There are a million reasons you might want to use GetBusy – it’s a quick and easy way to set up tasks with a deadline and assign them to different team members.
Tasks can be created from emails and Slack conversations, and it automatically sends reminders until they’re done.
2) Use technology to streamline work
Aside from task management, there are so many different ways technology can streamline your business’s workflow. Everything from repetitive admin tasks to finances and marketing can be automated with the right software. By streamlining your workflow, your business can be far more efficient and productive, with less time wasted.
Using cloud storage to store all your business’s files and documents means that they can be accessed from anywhere and shared easily – making it easier to coordinate work and collaborate on projects. While communication tools like Slack provide a quick, secure way to have conversations with colleagues, without the delay of sending emails back and forth.
One of the best areas for automation is marketing – use a social media scheduling tool like Hootsuite to set up regular posts on your social media channels. Hootsuite has some great features that will help you to analyze and optimize your posts, track mentions and interactions, and allows you to monitor conversations relevant to your business so that it’s easier to engage.
Another useful Marketing tool is Marketo, which can be used to manage and automate your email marketing campaigns, mobile marketing, and lead management.
It’s really important to pick the right software that will actually help you; you don’t want to be using so many different tools that you spend all your time managing them, especially if they don’t integrate with each other. Pick a few key areas that take up a lot of your business’s workload and find one or two tools that will help you.
3) Make employees feel valued
Improving productivity isn’t just about the work and the tools you’re using, you also need to look at how motivated your employees are. When your team feels valued and appreciated for the work they’re doing then their productivity increases.
It could be as simple as a quick email to let employees know when you’ve noticed and appreciated their hard work, or it could be something more structured like rewards or an employee of the month award.
Overall, productivity is what can make or break a business. So it’s important to look at ways of optimizing business operations, tracking progress, and encouraging employees to do the best job that they can to ensure your business is a success story.
Our favourite productivity hacks
Over the past seven years we’ve experimented with dozens of strategies to help us be more productive when working on our own business. Here are some of our favourites:
