No business – except Google maybe – is 100 percent productive. Employees don’t sit down at their desks like robots, work rigidly for a set period, then stand up and leave. Instead, they have a chat over the coffee machine, scratch their back from time to time and take long lunch breaks.
But while things like checking their social media accounts might slightly add to your wage bill, the habits of employees aren’t the only way your business is losing money. In fact, it’s often business leaders themselves who are the root of some of the biggest time-wasters in their office.
Does your business do any of this unnecessary stuff that wastes time and money?
Unnecessary Reports
Managers like to put together reports on things like how many conversions they got, how many applications they processed, or how many products came off the manufacturing line in a single day. These reports might be interesting to you, but it’s worth taking a step back and asking whether they are actually useful for the company as a whole. Before taking the time to write a report, ask yourself how it’s going to benefit your bottom line. Higher value reports would be the ones where you are tackling a particular problem in your production process. For instance, you might have poor customer service support. Reports that detail and track customer satisfaction may be beneficial.
You’re Doing Payroll By Hand
According to recent data, around 40 percent of small businesses don’t have an active website. That’s shocking in itself, but it points to a wider problem among the nation’s smaller firms: they’re simply not taking advantage of the technological tools that are now available.
Take payroll, for instance. Traditionally this was done by hand, before the invention of payroll software, and it was something that took a long time, especially if you had a business that paid by the hour. Not only did employers have to calculate the exact pay the individual staff had earned, but they also had to calculate things like taxes and bonuses by hand. It was a nightmare. The funny thing is, many businesses are still doing this by hand today, wasting their time on something can be quite easily automated. Some advice: grab a software package that’ll do all the legwork for you.
Responding To Distractions
A couple of decades ago, practically every up-and-coming business jumped on the open plan office bandwagon. Open plan was seen as the next stage in the evolution of the office and was a rejection of the claustrophobic cubicles that dominated in the 1980s and 1990s. Entrepreneurs saw the open plan office as a way to attract the best talent, by making their firms seem open and friendly.
But open plan offices had a darker side. It made it far easier for people to get distracted by the person in their office with a chronic cough or the person who just can’t stop talking. It’s a good idea, therefore, to think about how your office is zoned. Yes, you want places where employees can talk, but you also need quiet spaces for people who just need to get down to work.