Running your own business as a young entrepreneur is a thrilling task, but it also brings its fair share of challenges and setbacks. These can range from finding ways to hone your brand’s identity, to dealing with workplace inefficiency or finding ways to enhance employee wellbeing.
As a youthful company leader, while you will undoubtedly have substantial reserves of energy, passion and focus to bring to bear, you may not yet have all of the experience you need to address every obstacle you meet.
Fortunately, there are plenty of tips, techniques, and solutions available for you to draw upon as you craft your leadership strategy. For instance, when it comes to the important question of improving your company’s productivity, here are some top tips to take on board that will help you optimise efficiency while keeping both your staff and customers happy.
Make Staff Engagement A Priority
Research has revealed the significant contribution that engaged employees bring to a business’s levels of productivity. But how do you ensure that your workforce is engaged and fulfilled their roles?
One mistake that some companies make is only rewarding their star performers and failing to make the most of the untapped talents of other seemingly less effective workers. This narrow-minded viewpoint fails to take into account the fact that a person currently occupying one particular role may actually be better suited to an entirely different position in the company, with plenty to offer in the right job.
In addition, some employees may be eager to learn new skills and boost their repertoire but company leaders may never give them the opportunity to do so. By investing some time, money and effort in offering training for your staff members, you can not only teach them some highly useful new skills, but you will also improve their working experience and their productivity – not to mention their loyalty to both you and the company.
Of course, while investing in your employees is vitally important, it’s also crucial that you ensure that your staff aren’t engaged in activities that reduce your company’s productivity. For instance, time-wasting is remarkably common in UK workplaces – whether in the form of too much time spent on social media, long lunches, disorganised inboxes or plain old procrastination. Fortunately, there are a variety of things you can do to curtail these productivity-reducing habits; from limiting social media and arranging team events outside work, to introducing efficiency-boosting workflow management solutions.
Keep Things Simple
These days, there are so many different tools and technologies that businesses can use to help their staff optimise their productivity and work together more effectively. Of course, not all of these high-tech tools and software will be suitable for every business, and some may have downsides, such as prohibitive pricing.
However, there are a number of seemingly simple but highly effective virtual tools and services that come with a modest fee and can help your company save time, money, or simply become more efficient. For instance, if you have made the transition to an entirely paperless office – or if you are currently in the midst of transitioning – then your employees probably deal with large numbers of digital files and documents, not to mention countless emails. Vast amounts of files need to be stored in an intuitive and easy-to-access manner that makes them easy to locate – for instance, with the aid of digital asset management software.
It’s also a good idea to make sure that your files are as small as possible, so they don’t take up too much space on a server or workplace device. To help achieve this goal, all you need is the assistance of helpful tools such as a PDF compressor. Smallpdf can compress PDF files and reduce them by up to 99%, making them much easier to save and share, not to mention leaving your business plenty of storage room for even more files.
Other productivity-boosting technologies include online messaging platforms, which are particularly beneficial for companies that follow hybrid or remote working models. After all, when your team is dotted around the country – or even further afield – it can feel like a tall order to ensure that everyone is on the same page and pulling their weight. This is where online messaging programs and apps – such as Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Asana and Slack – come in handy, as they allow you and your employees to keep the channels of communication open during working hours – even if you don’t occupy the same postcode.
Establish Key Goals And Review Them Regularly
If you are aware that there are certain areas of your business which are not performing at maximum efficiency, then it’s recommended that you use goal-setting as one way to help address those issues. By creating clear goals and making sure that your team understand what – and how – they need to achieve, you will help to improve your company’s productivity.
However, the goal-setting is only the first step. To ensure that the goals are actually being met, and that a particular goal is still relevant for your company, it’s important to review your targets on a regular basis. Perhaps the easiest way to do this is to ask your team to submit progress reports on a weekly basis, to that everyone is up to speed and you can track your company’s progression toward achieving its productivity-enhancing goals.
Set A Good Example
As the head of the company, it’s important that you lead by example if you want to create a more productive and positive working environment that benefits both your customers and your team. If you ask your employees to take certain steps and then do the opposite yourself, it’s highly unlikely that your staff will feel motivated to follow orders – even if those orders will result in improved productivity.
It’s also a good idea to set yourself up as something of a mentor for your team, providing motivation and one-on-one meetings to make sure everyone is doing well. While many members of your team may feel confident about speaking up during regular staff get-togethers, others may hesitate to ask for help or express dissatisfaction in a public space. For these employees, one-on-one sessions give them the opportunity to voice their ideas or their struggles, and work with you to resolve any issues.
By offering these private get-togethers, you will be able to gain a more in-depth understanding of your employees and their strengths and weaknesses. This knowledge can then, in turn, help you to improve your workplace productivity by making sure that your team feels supported and is in the right role.
Summing Up
Becoming the young leader of your own company is a huge achievement, but it also carries a great weight of responsibility, particularly when it comes to ensuring your business achieves a certain level of productivity.
The good news is that, as you can, there are plenty of things you can do to optimise your company’s efficiency and meet targets, while at the same time fostering a positive and nurturing workplace atmosphere. Using these helpful strategies, you can guide your company toward a more productive future – and a brighter one too.
