In a hectic and fast-paced business environment, you can’t afford to waste time. It’s no wonder that more and more small companies have embraced outsourcing and partnerships with freelancers to maintain their competitive edge. Understand how to make the most of the time available to your team is crucial to growth.
However, did you know that most businesses waste precious hours every week in poorly organized or planned activities?
Here are the five most commonly overlooked areas where you might be wasting more time than necessary.
1. Your Staff Management Processes
Every business meets challenges when it comes to finding the best candidate for a role. However, companies that provide services on the go, such as touring artists, need to be able to find not only the best person for the job but also for the location and specific period. If you’re still using an excel spreadsheet and your mind to schedule everyone based on their preferences and skills, you’re going to waste a waste amount of time. Instead, opting for a crew scheduling software tool can not only save you a ton of time but also carry on personal preferences to a T. Indeed, scheduling solutions can integrate and analyze a variety of criteria, ensuring results you can trust as if they were your own.
2. Your Meetings
Granted, we live in a society that loves meetings. However, meetings can cost up to 70% of your team’s productivity. Next time you’re considering scheduling a meeting, ask yourself what you expect to achieve. Failure to plan, research, and prepare for meetings is the main reason why people waste time!
3. Your Strategy Plans
While more and more businesses are creating foolproof strategy plans for their activities, too many fall into the trap of confusing short-term goals with overall achievements. Ultimately, your short-term goals need to be integrated into the overarching strategy; they act as steps to achieve to move forward. Creating too many short-term objectives can not only guarantee stressful failures, but it can also distract from what your business wants to accomplish in the long-term. Don’t waste your energy with unrealistic provisionary achievements!
4. Your Internal Communication
How long does it take for an idea to make its way from your employees to your management team? If the answer is not quantifiable in a matter of minutes, then you know that you need to develop an open-communication plan. Indeed, open communication is all about encouraging people in your business to exchange ideas and information freely and smoothly. If you place obstacles between the team and the leadership board, such as restricting access or filtering messages, you, ultimately, slow down the communication process.
5. Your Business Selfies
Yes, a good business selfie can promote your brand. Everybody wants to know who’s behind business success. However, you can’t rely on selfies at conferences and trade shows to populate your company’s social media feed. Ultimately, your audience wants relatable content, which means they want to see your products and your customers.
Streamlining your business activities in 2020 is not about doing less, but about focusing your effort and time where it matters. In other words, making sure your time is dedicated to the most profitable activities is detrimental to growth. Avoiding time-demanding tasks with a low ROI – such as creating the perfect business selfie or building a customizable scheduling spreadsheet – is a matter of strategic resource use.
