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7 ways your business can start saving time and money now

Guest post by: Ciara Conlon

Article Overview: Disorganized employees are costing your business money, find out how to start saving time and money now.

7 ways your business can start saving time and money now

1. Adopt and email policy

It is important for employees to be made aware from the outset as to who needs to be informed of what information and not to bombard colleagues’ inboxes with CC mails and irrelevant information. Reduce the amount of questions asked in one email to assist quicker response time and facilitate faster search and retrieval.

2. Reduce time spent at meetings

Meeting can be one of the biggest time wasting activities in organisations, ensure you attendance is absolutely necessary at all meetings. One way to gauge if attendance is necessary or simply desirable is to ask if your input is essential for decision making at the meeting, if the meeting is an informative meeting, a summary of what took place can be given to you by any of the attendees. If your input is only required for a small portion of the meeting, maybe you could only attend that part or a phone conference could be organized for that section.

3. Get a company intranet

Intranets are a fantastic internal communication tool that can reduce time spent searching for company information. Intranets have usually a more user friendly interface and can accelerate search for documents and files. They can also support a more savvy workforce who are aware of company policy, vision and mission.

4. Share the company mission widely

If an employee is made to feel part of a company’s mission, they are more likely to be more motivated towards achieving the company’s goals. Motivated employees make for productive employees.

5. Clear out the clutter

Clutter can account for a large portion of a disorganized mind. Clearing away the stacks of papers, the old manuals and the month old filing from your desk and surrounding areas can have a great effect on focus and efficiency. Remember to clear the clutter from your mind too by taking some time to write a list of all the things that you need to do, personal or work items and then schedule them into your calendar or put them in your task list.

6. Encourage employees to schedule their weeks in advance

“Those who fail to plan, plan to fail” It is essential to make a plan for the week ahead some will reject this claim saying “I only have so much time in the week and I know what I have to do”. You only have so much time, but you have so many ways you can spend it, and taking the time to think about the tasks in advance and plan how much time you should spend on each task can assist in ensuring their completion. The days won’t always turn out exactly as planned, (just like the game plan in a football match) but at least you have a plan to help you achieve your goals.

7. Communicate regularly and effectively

Communication is key in all company’s success, communicate regularly with your staff, ensure that they make you aware of any roadblocks to their successful execution of their duties.

Organized employees save business’ time and money. They are usually more motivated, productive and have a greater work life balance. If you employees lose just one hour a day of their time due to disorganization and use the example of an employee earning €20 an hour. This will cost the company €100 a week (5 hours x€20) and €4,800 a year.

Multiply this by the number of employees and remember this is a very conservative estimate. Statistics say that disorganised employees can waste up to 4 hours a day looking for information, jumping from one task to another, missing deadlines, replacing lost items etc and wasting time on social media. And there is always the absenteeism problem due to stress and burnout to take into the picture.

So Take action now and make a plan of action to get your employees more organized and productive now, it could just give you the edge over the competition and help you to be the one who survives the turbulent times yet to come.

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Article Tags: business money, cost of disorganization, efficiency, focus, Organization, productivity, saving time, time and money



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