It is commonly known that time is money. When you waste time, you’re wasting money because you have to pay for all of the other things that are being used in that slot. This includes employees, energy, rent for any space or equipment you’re using, and a host of other expenses. If your business is not running inefficiently, it just might cause your business to go under.
If you’re in a spot where you’re looking for ways to run your business more efficiently so that you can save not only time, but money and valuable resources as well, here are some things that you can do:
Stop Having Meetings
Maybe the managers manual says that you have to have so many work related meetings every year. But why is that? Work meetings are known to be the number one cause of time wasted in the office.
You call a meeting, it takes everyone in the office 15 minutes to show up…you chat about things that need to be changed for another 30 while people space off and think about all of the other stuff they could be doing other than sitting in this meeting, and you send people back to work. It takes everyone 15 minutes to get back to what they were doing, so you’ve already wasted an hour, at least and nothing you said will have any effect.
If you have something to say, think about sending out an email just before or after the work day is over. This way, people read the message the next day when they come into work. You didn’t interrupt work flow and you said what you needed to say. If you know the issue is targeted towards specific people, just call them into your office and talk to them about it directly. It cuts out all of the time wasted on everyone as a whole and stops gossip from getting around.
Embrace New Technology
Sometimes new technology can be an investment to embrace, but if you embrace the right things, it’s well worth it in the end and will make things run much smoother for everybody in the office. Technology is designed to make things easier for people and businesses, not harder. Keep your eyes and ears open for new things that will do just this for you and your employees.
For instance, you could think about ditching out on the landline phones in the office and having everything switched to the cloud. Landlines are rarely used and phones that operate from the cloud are able to be used anywhere, so the entire office is actually being more efficient because they can take a work call from the room downstairs, or the coffee shop next door.