Even if productivity is higher than ever, you may still not be taking advantage of that productivity in your organization. Reports show that 18% of employees are actively disengaged. That’s usually a problem with business management and not the employees themselves.

Optimizing business efficiency is critical to getting the most productivity from your team. Use the seven tips below to learn what it takes to build efficient companies.

1. Encourage Community

Communication is one of the most critical parts of building an efficient company. If you have people who work in bubbles without knowing what other people are doing, it’s hard to keep everyone on the same page. You can’t collaborate and share ideas when that happens.

Create communication channels that let people in on what’s going on. You can share documents, workflows, and other things that help everyone in the organization get more done. You can do this with email, private chat channels, document collaboration, and other tools that make working together easier.

2. Create Standard Procedures

Procedures are everything when it comes to optimizing your business workflow. Even if you have a few employees that can get things done on time, that won’t be the case for everyone. That means you can’t predict output when everyone is doing things their way.

Creating standard procedures is a great way to create a more predictable output. Gather ideas about what your employees believe are the best ways to accomplish common tasks. Write those down in a procedure and send those procedures for everyone to follow.

You can continue optimizing these procedures as time progresses to figure out the best way to handle work. On top of that, it will make it easier for new team members and people who fill in to get up to date and productive on new work.

3. Don’t Run Too Many Meetings

It’s not wrong to hold meetings to keep yourself and your team up to date. However, some managers go overboard and try to micromanage everything with too many meetings.

Most of those meetings will be a waste of time that only serves to make managers feel like they’re in control. Your employees probably won’t find much meaning in these meetings and will feel like you’re wasting their time.

Run only as many meetings as necessary to keep everyone on the same page. Otherwise, get updates through email and other methods to get the information you need to understand project progress and other tasks.

4. Set Goals

It’s hard to get motivated to complete work when you don’t have goals. All you’re doing is going through the motions every day. When that happens, you get into a routine and eventually stop being as productive.

You can get more from your team when you give them something to work towards. Do this for everyone involved in the process, not just the people at the top. Having your entire team focused on accomplishing something big makes it easier for people to put their heads down and get to work.

This is also where you’ll see the benefits of outsourcing. You can bring in an experienced project manager to help you create and manage goals for your projects.

5. Use Productivity Tools

There are many tools available that can help your team become more productive. As mentioned above, business software is already out there that makes communication easier. But you don’t have to stop there.

Here are a few software tools available that can help your team get more done:

• Project management software
• Customer relationship management tools
• Database systems
• Cloud document storage

There are many tools available and many more that are tailored to your specific industry. Make sure you investigate all your options to see which ones make the most sense for your needs.

6. Invest in Automation

Another thing to look for when looking at software for your business is automation. A lot goes into all the tasks needed to run a company. If you don’t have the tools to remove redundant tasks, you’ll spend all your data on administrative work.

Luckily, there are many tools available that will remove those tasks. These tools can automatically enter data, automate communications, generate reports, and anything else you can think of.

Of course, there may be situations when you have work that your current tools can’t automate. But if you have a task you perform the same way every time and use structured data to do so, you can create a custom automation for that task. You can use outsourced or nearshore software development services to accomplish these tasks.

7. Create a Knowledge Base

The amount of information your team needs to know will grow as your business gets bigger. It’s a problem if your team has nowhere to turn to get the necessary information.

It pays to create a knowledge base for this situation. You can organize your business information in a company wiki to give everyone a place to find vital information.

Of course, you’ll also need to keep this up. Remind your team to add and update entries to your company knowledge base to keep everyone on the same page.

You’re Ready to Start Improving Business Efficiency

You only have so much time in the day, so you can’t afford to waste time on work that doesn’t move your company forward. Unfortunately, you’ll run into situations that reduce your company’s efficiency and the amount of work you complete daily.

The good news is that there are several tactics you can use to improve business efficiency. Use the tips above to get more done during the day.

Head back to the blog to find more helpful tips that will help you run a growing business.