We all know that time is money, but not everyone knows how to use their time productively and get the value from it that they deserve. Being a small business owner isn’t necessarily about working hard, it’s about working smart.

Here are 4 ways to reduce wasted time and energy within your business, and start working productively.

1. Make information easily accessible.

Making your team hunt down information is frustrating for everyone, absolutely not productive, and it encourages a lack of accuracy. After all, it’s easier to just guess than hunt down the information.

Give your team access to information like:

• Customer support knowledge. Members who work directly with customers should always be able to answer customer questions without hassle. Along with this, easy access to past customer history allows your team members to build off each other’s work instead of starting from scratch every time.
• Collected communication. Unifying the communication of your team to one place insures that important information your team creates and gathers is all accessible.

Knowledge is power, and without easy access to knowledge you put your team in a position where they feel powerless. This will end up being a weakness for your business, as well as a waste of time.

2. Keep meetings efficient and avoid wasting time.

Meetings are essential for team collaboration and goal orientation, but are also very vulnerable to becoming a sinkhole of wasted time.

To keep meetings productive, remember:

• Have a specific or singular goal. A smaller area of focus makes it harder to get off track.
• Try not to lecture. Keep in mind that communication is a two-way thing.
• Only have the people there that you must. The more unnecessary people you bring in, the more time and money you waste.

So, when done right, a meeting can give efficiency a big boost in your business. By following the tips given, (hopefully) you won’t fall into the sinkhole of wasted time.

3. Move into the cloud.

Moving into the cloud means staff can work from anywhere, whether they are at home sick, on a sales trip, or even living in another part of the world. Using cloud-based apps can greatly help in expanding a business, not to mention boost efficiency.

Here are some ways it can help:

• Save a lot of time by putting documents in one spot that everyone can access. Your team can read, edit, and share documents easily.
• Project management. If you feel as if team to customer communication is getting uncontrollable, move to the cloud and streamline it.
• Custom Tools. With custom cloud-based apps, you can manage your sales and inventory, work with your databases, and much more – from almost anywhere!

Although not all tasks can be worked on the cloud, it’s almost fool-proof. If you and your team can work from virtually any location, the productivity of your business is bound to increase.

4. Give more, get more in return.

It’s important to keep your team members satisfied and give them a good work-life balance so they don’t grow bitter toward their job. If they feel safe, happy, and appreciated, productivity will increase.

So, how do you do this for your team?

• Implement their input. Often businesses will tell their team that they value their input, but not as often do they actually put those ideas to use.
• Create a comfortable work space. If someone feels uncomfortable in their work space, they will likely spend their time fighting those feelings instead of actually doing work.
• Give them good tools. Outdated or clunky tools are the opposite of productive, as well as a major frustration for your team.

Studies show that happy employees are more productive. So, if there is one thing you should do to increase productivity, this is the one.

Getting to your perfect level of productivity and efficiency can be tough, but it is the key to running your small business while creating the opportunity to turn it into something big. Contact us at (888) 505-8215 or send us an email at info@verticalitcorp.com for more information.