There are a number of ways to improve your office productivity this year and beyond.
Take an objective look at your office operations to see if you or your team are guilty of any of these time wasters.
Dissecting a Problem to Death
In any group of people, there are the talkers and there are the doers.
If you’re not careful, the talkers will suck the life out of the doers until the problem has been discussed, dissected, considered, disseminated and dried up. At some point, you need to have a course of action, and the first step is to stop talking about it.
Sometimes any action is better than no action at all.
If your team is unsure what to do to solve a problem, pick one proposed solution and implement it. Eventually, you’ll land on a solution that works, and in the meantime, you’ll all learn what doesn’t work.
Over-referencing
Some office managers love to create cross-referencing systems.
They’ll have employees keep a binder or Excel sheet of data, check off work that’s done on the project in five places, and create summary project binders for “dashboard” views.
If you have an office manager like that, he or she will have created a team of paper-pushers just for you. People will be so busy making check marks and flipping through binder tabs that no real work will actually get done.
Of course a checks-and-balance system makes sense. But invest in a software system designed to do all the backend heavy lifting for you.
Online dashboards can be customized for your business where your staff has only to enter data once and it can be viewed in a variety of different ways by team members both local and on the road.
Meeting Madness
Meeting madness is when you and your staff attend so many meetings there’s nary a minute left in the work day to actually get to any of the work that was delegated during the meeting. If your 8-hour days are spent more in the meeting room than at your desk, you may be a victim of meeting madness.
It doesn’t take a 45-minute meeting to announce that you have a new client and discuss their needs.
Instead, use email, memos and company newsletters to get any information across that doesn’t actually require feedback from employees. If you’re just announcing something, or giving out general instructions to a team, skip the meeting.
As the following article looks at, here are 6 ways to take your office productivity into the next generation:
File Disorganization
Remember the old days when your office used filing cabinets and if an employee removed a file they had to leave a sign-out sheet in its place? Of course, everyone forgot to leave the sigh-out sheet at least once, leaving the next person wondering where in the office the file was.
File disorganization still happens today.
Even if your company is on a network, misnamed and misplaced electronic files on the “system” make it difficult for staff members to get work done.
Move on up to the cloud.
With a third-party cloud-based system, multiple employees can work on the same file at the same time.
Everyone can have their own log in and username authentication, and employees won’t be stepping on each other’s virtual toes.
These are easy changes to implement in any office to enhance productivity.
About the Author: Kate Supino writes extensively about best business practices.
