Productivity Planning For Small Businesses – 5 Simple Tips

There are so many articles, gurus, and people trying to tell you how to plan your business that it is inevitable that you have, at some point, seen productivity planning. The biggest question that you need to answer is: Does productivity planning really help small businesses? The simple answer to that question is yes, it does.

While we are not trying to be one of those gurus, we firmly believe that you can make a huge difference to your business with the right tips if you get the right strategy in place. That is why, in this article, we are going to give you some of our top tips to make productivity a priority in your small business.

5 Tips For Productivity Planning In Small Businesses

There are plenty of tips that you can find online and in books for productivity. That is simply because a lot of companies, if not all of them, see the advantage of real productivity and want to get there as quickly and efficiently as possible. That is why we have collates five of our favorite tips that you can use for your small business.

Set Realistic Goals And Stick To Them

Setting goals is an obvious way to try and become more productive for people and businesses alike. However, people’s biggest downfall is to overestimate their abilities or underestimate the challenges that they will face along the way. Therefore, it is vital that you create realistic goals and stick to them.

One of the best ways to do this is to have a pool of tasks that have no urgency or that you can complete on an ad-hoc basis. Then, create goals that seem slightly too easy for you. That will leave you time to overcome possible challenges and still be on track. If you do finish the goals, then take a task from the ad-hoc pool and complete that, too.

The more that you create goals, the more refined your task-setting skills will become.

Utilize Collaboration and Communication Tools

If you have a good system for collaboration and have supplied your staff with network connections to the office server, you should take advantage of it. You can do that by using Trello, Kanban, or any other project management tool you use. Keeping track of where projects are is a great way to show the staff progress, and visual progress is a great motivation technique.

Set Good Working Conditions

Employee wellbeing is crucial to any business, and the better the environment that they work in, the more productive they become. Whin, setting up workplace team-building exercises is challenging to impossible in the current situation, there are still things that you can do to help people working from home. For example, letting your staff have a video conference for lunch to talk about their own current situations may help these ways to better to organize their home office environment.

Sending out vouchers for lunch or shopping vouchers can be a real hit, too. Perhaps take part in a weekly raffle where employees can win something that you can have delivered to their house, such as something from Amazon, or a bunch of flowers, etc.

Use Automation Tools To Your Advantage

There are a lot of mundane tasks that people need to do every day. That can take up valuable time and make people feel underappreciated and like they are wasting their time. Taking the time to evaluate all of your business processes and investing in software or hardware that will automate them is a huge morale boost.

Furthermore, automating laborious tasks will allow people to dedicate more time to carry out the more complex and demanding projects they get job satisfaction.

Accountability Is Key

While accountability is often seen as a “big brother” tactic, the opposite is actually true. Surveys show that feeling underappreciated is one of the primary reasons people leave their jobs searching for something better. Giving them accountability for more tasks or sub-departments will allow them to feel appreciated and like they are a real asset to the team. Just remember not to use this approach to point fingers in a negative way. If something needs to be done that has not been, then talk to the person in charge of it, and offer help if they need it.

Conclusion

Productivity is a requirement for businesses. The more that you have, the better the company will operate, and the better service you can provide to your customers. While not all of these tips are immediately implementable by everyone, we firmly believe that they are steps that you should work towards with the main goal of providing more to get more.