Ideas for Streamlining Your Small Business

Managing your tasks can be complicated, especially if you’ve become inundated with new clients or customers. Of course, that’s a great reason to need some help with improving your workflow efficiency but figuring out what to do to net you and your team some extra time isn’t easy. We’ve put together some ideas and things to consider during the everyday operation of your business. Get ready for some Ideas for Streamlining Your Small Business to succeed!

Streamlining Your Small Business - Centralised Collaboration Software

If you’re not using any software like this yet, you’re probably wasting a whole heap of time waiting for email replies and getting confused by lengthy message chains. You might also be spending hours chasing down the right person to help you with a task or explain a piece of work that’s been done. Finding a way to collaborate with your team efficiently is very important. Get your business set up with apps, such as Slack, to keep everyone in contact with each other.

Whether you’re in the office, or working from home, you can be sure that getting someone’s attention will be much easier even if it’s just to touch base and check how your team is doing. You can also form larger group chat rooms for the entire company providing everyone with a space to bounce ideas off each other. Softwares like Trello can also be handy for managing workflow and delegating work. You’ll be able to keep track of what everyone is currently working on and figure out who needs a new task without wasting time in meetings.

Streamlining Your Small Business - Promote Group Cohesion

Whilst meetings can be overly lengthy, it’s important to regularly check in with everyone so you’re all on the same page. Getting together once a week for half an hour just to keep the team updated can drastically reduce mistakes caused by people not understanding what everyone else is up to. Make sure your team is aware of who is responsible for what and you’ll then also be creating an open window for people taking their initiative on certain tasks without asking for things to do.

Streamlining Your Small Business - Use Templates

If you’re overloaded with paperwork and document creation, consider drawing up a load of template files and make them easily accessible to the right people. There’s nothing worse than being asked to create a new contract for someone and having to mess around recreating one from a previous employee. Similarly, consider creating a job advert template that can be filled easily for each role. Templates such as this will speed up processes and will also lead to a much more uniform appearance and tone of voice, adding an extra layer of professionalism to your business.

Streamlining Your Small Business - Assess Your Workflow

Studying the way you currently run things can quickly highlight bottlenecks and unnecessary steps that can be eradicated with a few quick changes. You’ll want to figure out which specific processes are the most important and see which processes can be either taken away or merged. Some of the longest, time-wasting steps happen when tasks are shared between multiple departments. Try to see if you can restrict a task to one department where possible. Don’t rely on your own common sense and intuition here. There is only one group of people that know what’s taking too long and what can be done better. The people that are doing the tasks. Speak to your team and ask for feedback on what could be done better, and you’ll likely be met with some helpful suggestions.

Streamlining Your Small Business - Automation

We’re not going to suggest replacing your staff with robots, as cool as that may sound. But there are lots of different ways in which you can take out the human element of certain tasks, speeding up these processes. One task that is often chosen for automation is data gathering. This is incredibly helpful to do as you’ll also be able to utilise that data to improve other processes too. As well as this task, you can also automate a lot of your marketing such as social media scheduling, and blog post scheduling. Have your social media manager plan out a week’s worth of posts on Monday and be free for other tasks every other day. You can also automate large parts of your customer support such as utilising support ticket software, and automatic email responses providing helpful information to customers.

You can also automate some work for your accounting department. For example, they can use different financial tools that allow you to quickly manage finances and streamline your processes because they integrate with other business tools for easier management. By taking advantage of these tools, your department can maximize efficiency and productivity, allowing them to access revenue in hours and quickly reinvest for growth.

Lastly, don’t forget to manage essential tasks like server backups via automation as it can be very easy to forget such an important task. Once you lose your data because you forgot to back everything up, you’ll wonder why on earth it wasn’t scheduled regularly. You can also get some software to automatically sort your payroll so that you never miss paying your team. Having to explain why you’ve not paid everyone this week isn’t a pleasant experience and it’s not fun for everyone else to wonder where their paycheck is.

Hopefully this article was able to give you some out-of-the-box Ideas for Streamlining Your Small Business to succeed. Although managing your tasks can be complicated when in a hectic environment, there are multiple tools out there to help you out. If you know any other interesting tips, let us know in the comments below.

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