Some of the key focuses of my blog are: Financial Literacy, Money, Business and Entrepreneurship. A key aspect of any successful business is the efficient use of time. The following contributed post is thus titled; Business Leaders – Are You Wasting Time?
* * *
Wasting time is the number one ‘no-no’ when it comes to anything to do with business life. We hear that ‘time is money,’ and that’s no accident. Any business leader, at least those successful the world over, will have mastered the art of effectively using their time. Honing your own personal schedule is all very well and good, but when looking at the larger picture, your business may be telling you something else entirely. If your business is wasting time, even in small ways, its inefficiency can build and build in its aggregate form.
It might take time to inspect and fully make effective, but a business concerned with improving its growth and optimizing it’s process will need to cut out the fat sooner or later. Here are the places you might look first:
Payroll
Your payroll department is often the last thing you’ll establish when you’re starting to grow your firm. This is because a certain amount of employees may not warrant a dedicated specialist to come in and handle these hours, it might be that the manager or the owner takes care of this. This task is unlikely going to be the only one undertaken by the person responsible in this case. While you must always dedicated the correct amount of time to this task lest you make mistakes that can cost the satisfaction of the employee you have impeded, you can always implement time-saving options to help you deliver your duties well.
For example, using a service to create a paystub can help you organize dedicated formatting efforts for your payroll, both calculating and providing proof of income and charges to your employees routinely and with predictable formatting. This can be very helpful if dealing with a team of variant roles and variant hours worked, as templates can be saved and you can adjust via hours, salary or any other payment criteria your business has setup. Payroll can often be the most intense and important consideration to get right, so taking out any human error and providing a uniform formatting option of proof can help the person responsible take care of this task appropriately each time.
Dead Weight
None of us enjoy having dead weight on our time. This is perhaps one of the easiest ways to reduce total staff motivation, waste money on salaries and have to conduct time and money into the cleanup that a faulty staff member will need to cover them. This means that inspecting your staff routinely to ensure they’re working hard as per reasonable standards, that they are paying attention to your policies and security/safety protocols, as well as ensuring they care about the end result of their work can help you identify anyone who isn’t pulling their weight, or who is willfully neglecting it. In certain industries such as hospitality and retail, this can be quite a common occurrence. With a skilled, reasonable and rational eye, you can decide to conduct training efforts, motivate that person further, or let that person go.
With these two simple tips, you can cut plenty of wasted time from your schedule, and the larger flow of your business.
