The more you can have your employees working on assignments aligned with their skill set, the more productive your small business will be. Rather than have them stop every couple of minutes to work on a smaller task, it can help to find other methods to get simpler tasks done rather than have your employees stop everything they’re working on to do it. Here are a few great, efficient, and more affordable ways of getting the busy work out of the way so your team can focus on their assignments.
Outsourcing
It can be a bit of a dirty word these days, but outsourcing is an effective way to do business for not only large corporations, but smaller businesses as well. Your company should be focused on really doing one particular niche activity very well. Anything outside of the scope of that focus, or anything that your business may not be skilled at working on, could potentially be outsourced. Companies that emphasize their strength at writing code for websites, for example, could do things much better and faster.
Tracking Expenses
One thing you really don’t want to have your employee’s wasting time on is writing down receipts and keeping track of them when they travel. It’s easy to make mistakes adding up amounts this way, but services like Expensify can be a real godsend for frequent business travelers. This service will automatically record everything that people who travel spend on business expenses. Take a photo of any receipt or bill and it gets automatically tabulated into an account in the cloud. This means that at a glance, you can tell what your employees are spending and they don’t have to stop and save every receipt they get along the way.
Collaboration Software
Services like Google Drive allow you to collaborate and communicated more effectively with your employees without asking them to constantly send you updated versions of documents. Instead, shared folders can automatically sync any changes they make so you’ll always have the most updated information on file without having to constantly micromanage collaboration activities yourself.
Data Crunching Software and Services
The state of big data these days usually means that the amount of information you have to go through in order to really understand your sales statistics is absolutely enormous. It’s not common to have enough computing power to be able to take all of the sales statistics, customer satisfaction reports and all of the data you collect in a day and analyze the huge files involved to create conclusions. That’s why it helps to use dashboard software like Domo’s Products which include services to store your analyzed data in one spot as well as finances, reports, and warehousing for business intelligence to cover everything for each team in your office. Though this is just an example of available software you can use to complete small tasks efficiently.
For start-ups and small businesses, there are plenty of additional online tools and resources out there to help your workers stay on track. As a manager, you will find that incorporating these tools into your business’s operations will save you and your employees’ time so you can focus on the big picture to expand and reach the goals you want to achieve.
Georgia Webster currently writes on behalf of Domo.com.