Seasoned business owners understand that striving for efficiency isn’t all about reining in costs. There are several other ways to make your operations run better, and these strategies can improve virtually all aspects of your day-to-day operations. Here are a few practical but impactful things that you can do to step up efficiency and bolster performance.
Get Smarter About Monitoring Your Systems
Pervasive problems with the systems and applications that your workforce uses most frequently in their job duties can be a major hindrance to individual, departmental, and company-wide productivity levels. Likewise, recurring issues with applications that your customers use in their dealings with you such as account management portals or interfaces for placing orders could seriously compromise your customer engagement goals.
Even when you’ve put a lot of planning and work into designing key systems, it’s reasonable to expect that you’re going to have to contend with performance issues in one form or another. Build in design components that facilitate fast detection of malfunctions. Use distributed tracing could give you a way to pinpoint queries or processes that aren’t working like they should.
What is distributed tracing and how can it improve applications’ performance and efficiency? It monitors activity within an application or platform and isolates where problems are originating from. This type of intensive, responsive performance monitoring is an excellent tool for addressing deficiencies proactively. Rather than learning about issues from individual reports, you can learn about them in real-time and immediately begin dispatching repair protocols.
Optimize Your Workforce’s Value
The best business managers are heavily invested in helping employees reach their full potential. This involves hitting key benchmarks in the performance of their individual job duties, and it may also entail redefining the scope of individuals’ job roles. You want to be able to get the highest quantity and also the highest quality of work output from everyone on your team. Aim to challenge people, but don’t overload them.
Get input directly from employees about how easily they’re managing their individual job tasks and whether they’re sufficiently challenged. People genuinely appreciate when you ask for feedback about these matters. Individual personnel members may be able to give you a better sense of frontline challenges and performance barriers than departmental supervisors who are one step removed from conditions and dynamics that affect productivity.
Redistributing job duties within departments might be a good way to balance workloads more equitably. It could also allow you to assign your most capable team members to the tasks that are most worthy of their efforts and attention. In some cases, outsourcing administrative tasks could free up the best-performing members of your inhouse team to take on a more challenging and expansive array of job duties.
Make Training an Ongoing Priority
Continuing training your workforce beyond basic orientation and onboarding is another excellent way to generate an increase in the quantity and quality of people’s work. Thorough training programs tend to make people more confident about their job roles. Demystifying some of the intricacies of specific job duties and giving them practical strategies to address problems can eliminate on-the-spot decision making that may or may not yield positive outcomes.
Comprehensive training equips people to carry out their job tasks with less guesswork, and it fosters consistency among employees’ work product. Finally, it empowers people to seek out more challenges. When people are less worried about whether they’re doing enough work or doing work the right way, they’ll be more inclined to set their own standards for excellence and continually strive for improvement.
To make your business more efficient, you’ve got to be conscientious about how you manage resources. Likewise, you need to build your infrastructure in a way that makes work processes mechanical, consistent, and adaptive. Ultimately, using and identifying tools that can optimize systems’ performance and enable your personnel to do better work can make a dramatic difference in your business’ overall efficiency.
