Doing more with less is a practice that nearly every
business owner wants to excel in. And yet, there’s a fine line between making
your employees work harder without burning them out. A team that works more
doesn’t necessarily mean they are more productive. Excessive working hours can
quickly lead to fatigue and mental exhaustion, resulting in lower quality of
work.
Small business leaders may feel particularly time-crunched.
While you may feel obligated to add more to your plate that may not always be
the best move. Here are three ways to achieve more with less in modern small
business management without running the risk of burnout.
Automate What You Can
As a small business, resources are expected to be pretty
tight. Fewer employees and less access to capital means that you need to be
strategic about the projects your team prioritizes. Giving mundane tasks to
employees is a waste of time, which is why it's important to lean into
automation. Newer technology has made getting repetitive tasks done easier than
ever.
For instance, hours can be saved with the right accounting software tool.
Instead of sending follow-up reminders to vendors for invoicing or manually
inputting data, leave these tasks to the software. Not only will you gain
precious time back, but there’s less chance for manual error. Quarterly and
end-of-year planning will be much easier when you have accurate reports
detailing your expenses and profits.
Other business areas to consider automating include data
processing, scheduling, and email marketing. With data processing, important
stats from numerous sources can be gathered, extracted, and centralized for
easier analysis. Scheduling meetings can be simplified with automated tools to
remind you of upcoming meetings and coordinate schedules both internally and
externally. Email marketing automation can be useful to target subscribers
based on their search history, recent behaviors, and past preferences. By
automating these tasks and more, your employees can think strategically and
work on more complex, tedious work.
Prioritize and Delegate
Do you feel like you're being pulled in thousands of
directions? One minute you’re negotiating with a vendor and the next minute
you’re approving an employee’s vacation time. Switching from one task to
another may make you feel like you’ve got everything in control, when in
actuality what needs to get done is slipping through the cracks. Instead of
taking the time to focus on the upcoming board meeting a month away, you find
yourself scrambling to get the presentation completed the night before.
Prioritizing and delegating are important leadership skills
to master. Take a step back to evaluate everything that needs to get done and
in what order. From there, see how assigning tasks to your team can empower
them to step up and take control. Doing so will help you improve your
business’s overall productivity while giving you the chance to focus on
higher-priority tasks.
When prioritizing and delegating, consider your company
goals. What is essential to the business and what can be put on the back burner
for now? From there, either ask or nominate someone on your team to work on a
certain responsibility. Giving them a project to own from start to finish may
just be the nudge they need to step it up to the next level. In the process,
they may develop a skill set that they are truly passionate about, such as
project management.
Streamline Workflows
Just because something has always been done this way doesn’t
mean it’s necessarily the right or best way. Streamlining workflows can speed
up processes while reducing unneeded steps. For example, a blog post may not
need to be read and approved by everyone on the leadership team before being
published. Instead, maybe one or two stakeholders can review the article before
it goes live.
Having too many stages or approvals within a process isn’t
only unnecessary but it can cause frustration. Employees can easily get
disgruntled when a piece of a project is held up by the lengthy approval
process. That’s why evaluating workflows often is important to see where
certain steps can be tightened or removed altogether. Perhaps two stakeholders
can approve the blog post simultaneously instead of waiting for one person to
pass it off to the next.
When analyzing your current process, think about what types
of tools can come in handy. For example, project management platforms are
available to enhance collaboration and resource management. With these tools,
you can identify where a project is at any given time and which steps are
taking the most amount of time. These insights can help identify where the
loopholes are and how to best solve them.
Achieving More with Less: Tips and Takeaways
Modern technology has revolutionized how work gets done. New
platforms and tools are making real-time collaboration easier. Video
conferencing and communication channels such as Slack have increased the
ability to talk through ideas and brainstorm solutions. While all of these
tools may be tempting to add to your systems and processes, it’s important to
consider what your team actually needs.
This is where thinking before you act is important. Instead
of automatically onboarding the latest and greatest technology, ask yourself if
it will benefit the company. Analyze how things are currently going and decide
where there is a need for improvement. Automating routine tasks or eliminating
an approval step in a process may free up a person’s responsibilities to take
on more strategic work.
Achieving more with less requires leaders to think about
what is most important and remove anything trivial. Exploring technology
solutions in addition to finding opportunities for employees to own certain
aspects of a project can lead to long-term business success.
