There are a lot of words that a business owner doesn’t like to hear. One of the worst has to be downtime as it signifies waste. This month, we’ll examine the effects of downtime and how to calculate the financial impact of a downtime event.
If there is one thing that the COVID-19 pandemic has taught us is that a person’s environment may not have as big of an effect on productivity as we once thought. That said, many businesses that were forced to disperse their workforces as stay-at-home orders were put in place, have seen their overall productivity drop by about one percent (depending on who you ask), which considering all the variables is a win for any business that needed to go that route. In fact, some employees are so much more productive than they are at the office that now that many businesses can reopen, there is a decision to be made. This month we thought we’d talk about how crucial your productivity figures are to your business and how it may have an effect on your management style moving forward.
With so many things that need to be accomplished each day, it always helps to have all the information needed to complete these tasks. If a task has no context assigned to it or no insight into how to approach it, productivity and morale are going to suffer. To prevent this, you need to properly task out your team’s goals. Here, we’ve provided some practices to help.
While there are definitely gimmicks when it comes to technology in the small business (for instance, USB-powered staplers) there are many devices and technologies that have far more utility, although they may not seem to be applicable to all industries. One example would be the digital signage solutions that have grown in popularity. While they may seem to have limited uses outside of retail, there are plenty of ways to use them to your advantage.
Many businesses need to deal with a lot of vendors in order to keep their doors open - enough that, at times, it might seem that the most time and energy is spent juggling these vendors. That doesn’t have to be the case, however, at least where your technology solutions are concerned.
