Managing a team of employees can be a balancing act, but helpful tools exist
For small businesses, management of the different aspects of your organization can be a challenge. From ensuring the bottom line that sales are being generated, to focusing on growth and improving performance, expansion across new geographies, and on top of all that, taking care of your employees. It can be a challenge.
Yet, by embracing technology and utilizing the tools available, it is possible for your employees to optimize their working structure and become more efficient and organized in their job roles. Today, there are a lot of different products on the market that over promise and underperform making it difficult to know where to start.
Below are some of the steps you can start taking to utilize the resources available to you and take back your business.
Utilize remote working
The world has changed, there’s no doubt about that. Yet this change does not need to carry negative connotations as there have been a lot of benefits introduced by working circumstances over the past year.
By working remotely, employees are able to achieve a better work life balance, saving time on their daily commute and being able to be around family for more hours of the day. Not only that, working from the comfort of their own home, with the company of pets and being able to take proper lunch breaks is great for improving employee wellbeing and productivity.
The most important thing is ensuring your business is geared up for remote working. Tools like Office 365 enable employees to safely manage, store and collaborate on documents, while Microsoft Teams enables remote workers to stay connected throughout the day.
Use technology to support decisions
One of the major setbacks of running a small business is the amount of admin that comes with it. While you need to be focusing on your clients, having important conversations, and supporting your employees, you’re instead spending hours on paper shuffling, bookkeeping and other tedious admin tasks.
Another example is having a utility bill management system will free up some redundant workload and will prevent you from paying extra for late payments.
Why not use technology to lighten the load? Software like QuickBooks provide intuitive solutions that enable you to automatically take control of your bookkeeping, manage and issue invoices, track freelancer costs, manage cash flow, and track project profitability.
Best of all, these solutions are scalable and are able to adapt and grow alongside your business, putting you on the best path for success from the very beginning.
Project Management
Keeping track of what your team is working on can be tricky when you’re too busy to keep track of your own workload. And when teams are not well connected, work can be duplicated, and problems can arise.
There are a range of project management tools geared towards small businesses that can take some of the load off of keeping track of cross-departmental activities and internal team activities alike. Some of the best rated platforms include Asana, Monday.com and Slack. These solutions enable teams to work together more efficiently, share documents and other key information in a more manageable way and offer reminders that enable you to focus on work priorities.
Consider a virtual assistant
Struggling to keep up as your business grows? Hiring a virtual assistant could be a great solution. Virtual assistants are people that usually work remotely on a freelance basis and look after admin type activities. This could be booking meetings and arranging travel needs, to creating presentations and ordering corporate services.
A virtual assistant can be shaped to support your business in any way you require. It’s more efficient than employing admin staff that then don’t have enough to do when you have periods of downtime.
Organize your workspace
Having a single workspace, you can focus in is important for productivity and mental wellbeing. Especially over the past year, many people have struggled to adapt to at home workplaces, particularly if there’s a lot of family around or a lack of quiet spaces to focus.
Yet setting aside a consistent workspace will help you to get in the right frame of mind daily and keep distractions at bay. It is also important to make sure you have the correct technological tools in place to work. No one wants to be half an hour late to that meeting because their laptop wouldn’t start.
Overall, while running a small business can be overwhelming, the key is to utilize the tools and resources available to you in order to preserve time and capitalize of efficiencies that will allow your business to grow.
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