As a small business, you really do not have too much budget at your disposal to invest in infrastructure that can foster high productivity. However, thanks to the recent advances in technology, there are a number of tools that your small business may deploy to ensure that the productivity of your employees go up. This is important - according to various studies conducted on employee productivity, it has been found that the average employee spends 20 hours a week online with 5 hours being on non-work related stuff. The largest contributor to this workplace inefficiency is Facebook - an overwhelming 41% of time is wasted here.
However, it is not advisable to firewall your workplace. In a recently published book, employee engagement consultant Adrian Gostick claims that a happy workplace is extremely crucial to improve productivity. In the absence of social networking at work, this productivity can go down. So the way forward should be in drawing that fine line between keeping employees happy and letting them enjoy their “me time” at work. Here are some tips to bring about this balance:
RescueTime
RescueTime is a simple software that monitors the activities on your computer. Installed on your employees’ desks, it tells you the amount of time each one of them spend on their Facebooks, Twitter and work. One business I know collects the data from all their employees on a weekly basis and creates a leaderboard of people who spend the most time working. Without judging employees for the time they spend on social networks, a leaderboard of this sort is a great way to push your employees into spending their time at work in a more productive way.
Migrate to an ERP
If your business is still making use of excel sheets and paper invoices to handle your resources, then it is high time you moved to an ERP system. An ERP system drastically improves the productivity of your employees. In a traditional setup, employees spend hours every month talking to various teams over disagreements on invoices, finances and purchasing requirements.
With an ERP system, all of this data is automatically updated to each system which ensures your employees have more time on their hands to do productive work. Also, the modern ERP systems are on the cloud - applications like NetSuite are hosted remotely by partner companies who provide ERP solutions to customers over the internet. These NetSuite partners often charge you based on the number of users who will require access to the ERP system. For a small business, this is often on the lines of a few hundred dollars; which is definitely a worthy investment for increasing productivity of your organization.
Outsourcing
Unlike what the mainstream media would want you to believe, outsourcing is in fact a pretty smart move to help increase productivity of your organization. And this of course comes with a drop in expenditure. The key here is to look at outsourcing as a channel to increase productivity and not decreasing costs. Looking it this way helps you weed out cheap sweatshops that often bid low but are also notorious for their low quality work. Focusing on productivity improvement helps you find the right partner who can take all the non-core tasks away from you thus letting you focus only on the most important revenue generating activities.
Apart from RescueTime, the other two tips will require the owner to extensively research on your requirements and will cost time and money to arrive at the proper solution. But once you do this, you would ensure a high quality productive work environment for your employees.
However, it is not advisable to firewall your workplace. In a recently published book, employee engagement consultant Adrian Gostick claims that a happy workplace is extremely crucial to improve productivity. In the absence of social networking at work, this productivity can go down. So the way forward should be in drawing that fine line between keeping employees happy and letting them enjoy their “me time” at work. Here are some tips to bring about this balance:
RescueTime
RescueTime is a simple software that monitors the activities on your computer. Installed on your employees’ desks, it tells you the amount of time each one of them spend on their Facebooks, Twitter and work. One business I know collects the data from all their employees on a weekly basis and creates a leaderboard of people who spend the most time working. Without judging employees for the time they spend on social networks, a leaderboard of this sort is a great way to push your employees into spending their time at work in a more productive way.
Migrate to an ERP
If your business is still making use of excel sheets and paper invoices to handle your resources, then it is high time you moved to an ERP system. An ERP system drastically improves the productivity of your employees. In a traditional setup, employees spend hours every month talking to various teams over disagreements on invoices, finances and purchasing requirements.
With an ERP system, all of this data is automatically updated to each system which ensures your employees have more time on their hands to do productive work. Also, the modern ERP systems are on the cloud - applications like NetSuite are hosted remotely by partner companies who provide ERP solutions to customers over the internet. These NetSuite partners often charge you based on the number of users who will require access to the ERP system. For a small business, this is often on the lines of a few hundred dollars; which is definitely a worthy investment for increasing productivity of your organization.
Outsourcing
Unlike what the mainstream media would want you to believe, outsourcing is in fact a pretty smart move to help increase productivity of your organization. And this of course comes with a drop in expenditure. The key here is to look at outsourcing as a channel to increase productivity and not decreasing costs. Looking it this way helps you weed out cheap sweatshops that often bid low but are also notorious for their low quality work. Focusing on productivity improvement helps you find the right partner who can take all the non-core tasks away from you thus letting you focus only on the most important revenue generating activities.
Apart from RescueTime, the other two tips will require the owner to extensively research on your requirements and will cost time and money to arrive at the proper solution. But once you do this, you would ensure a high quality productive work environment for your employees.