The Small Business Productivity Guide: 10 Tips to Boost Your Output

How to maximize your small business’s productivity

It is easier than you think to maximize your company’s productivity. Use these strategies to see gains in efficiency.

1. Take advantage of communication and collaboration tools.

Communication has never been so important. In times of reduced physical interaction and remote work, sending emails back and forth is not enough. Teams must now coordinate across many different applications for even the easiest projects. Adding extra steps to a formerly simple process can threaten the efficiency of the most basic tasks and exponentially slow the entire operation.

The best way to manage a virtual team is by investing in new digital collaboration tools that now dominate the business landscape. These can facilitate instant and effective communication through intuitive visual displays, live updates and performance analytics that measure individual employees’ productivity.

Software products — such as Slack, Asana and Trello — and cloud-based file-sharing services like Google Cloud and Microsoft OneDrive allow your company to streamline all communication through a central hub. Also, they’ll help to easily transfer files and edit living documents in real time. All users can contribute, and many of these services indicate which changes were provided by each team member.

2. Make sure employees are accountable.

For companies without a physical office, transparency is beneficial for your business. Productivity is the measure of time well spent. The presence of more available hours does not guarantee that those hours will be beneficial or even used. The first step is to ensure employees are at least putting in the required work hours. Tools that track when your employees sign on for the day will alert you that they are present and putting in the required time. To avoid tracking this data manually, install a time-tracking application to manage it for you.

Review employee performance at least yearly and compare their actual results to productivity targets. Reward those who meet or exceed their goals and help those who fall short to identify and correct problems. Replace employees who consistently fail to accomplish their goals.

3. Set and prioritize employees’ goals.

Once you know employees are working the hours they are supposed to, help them make the most of their day. Setting clear employee performance goals or targets will improve morale and productivity. People tend to work more efficiently when they’re focused on a clear and predetermined objective with a deadline.

How do you set this goal? You break it down into digestible subgoals by working backward. Determine the outcome you expect from your employees by reverse-engineering the process so that you can provide a series of outcomes.

For example, imagine your goal is to ship 100 chairs by the end of the week. First, identify where in the production chain a chair needs to be on Friday morning to ship it that weekend. Repeat this process for your product each day of the week or, for longer-term goals, each week or month. This develops comprehensive guidelines with clear expectations for both yourself and your employees. This process can also help familiarize you with the grittier work of your staff and provide better insight into the monthly, weekly and daily targets for each position.

4. Create favorable working conditions.

Google and Facebook spend a lot to offer their employees productivity-enhancing workspaces. They understand that happiness is critical to employee performance. That doesn’t mean you need to install a fully staffed gym in your office. Little adjustments often have an outsize effect.

Although workplace amenities like that premium heating system you purchased might not currently impact your employees who work remotely, consider virtual substitutes. Was your semimonthly office pizza party a big hit? Send your employees a small voucher to order lunch and schedule a video call so you can all eat together one afternoon. A team that feels valued will have extra motivation to be productive and accomplish the goals in front of them.

5. Eliminate time-wasting activities.

If you want to increase output, you should seek to improve employee engagement. Every hour spent at your business needs to count. However, even the most passionate and dedicated workers will let their minds wander and spend an extra five minutes on social media.

To stay productive, minimize opportunities for unnecessary diversions. Delete distracting phone applications — or at least mute them during work hours. Turn off phone notifications or, better yet, turn off the phone and lock it away in your desk drawer.

Try to minimize meetings as well. When you must have them, create and stick to an agenda. Team members should get in the habit of updating each other on their progress using project management software like Slack before the meeting. That way the actual time can be spent in real-time collaboration rather than time-consuming reporting.

Above all, reassure your employees that they shouldn’t beat themselves up if they find themselves distracted. Rather, they should gently guide their minds back to work.

6. Automate as many tasks as possible.

If you’ve been in business for a while, you know that many processes and activities are still being done manually. Those are often small but essential tasks.

But what if those tasks could be automated so that you and your employees could devote more time to more complex processes or tasks?

Assess the operations of your business and invest in software that automates as many of those processes as possible. That way you can get the mundane work done efficiently and your employees can focus on other tasks. More of these solutions are available now than ever before because of the current demand for mobile infrastructure. This is an excellent time to reassess which job functions can be eliminated so you can better allocate time to more pressing needs that require the critical thought of a human worker.

7. Create an efficient and organized workflow.

A long to-do list and urgent deadlines popping up among an overabundance of messages and alerts can overwhelm you and your employees. Redefine your workflow to find a balance that provides a sense of priority and clarity among the bevy of notifications.

Assess your daily task list and rank each item according to its level of importance. Rearrange the list and decide which projects can be delayed or paused. Then help employees focus on what matters most. Every alert can seem urgent in a virtual workspace, so the occasional re-evaluation can save everyone time and energy.

8. Outsource time-consuming menial tasks.

Your top talent shouldn’t spend their time doing repetitive menial tasks such as data entry. Hire a freelancer or outsourcing company to handle tasks such as payroll. That way your employees can use their skills and effort on accomplishing critical things like production, customer interaction or growing the company.

9. Integrate your apps and systems to work seamlessly.

With a software application for every work area, it can be hard to keep everything straight. Not only do employees need to learn multiple software platforms, but they need to know what to use for each task. They also need to know how to bring data from one into the other. You can improve productivity by integrating your apps so this is done automatically. Then employees only need to learn a few software applications because the data they need from other apps is already there.

Buy software that is compatible or from the same company, such as Salesforce. Alternatively, you can use Zapier to connect disparate software platforms and allow them to communicate with each other.

10. Learn from your team.

Are you struggling to understand why certain tasks take so long? Have you been searching through every part of the process but just can’t find a problem area that can be streamlined? One way to find solutions to these problems is to ask those who would know better than you: your employees.

Because your employees work through these processes every day, they are the ones who are familiar with the minutiae of every function. When investigating potential areas of improvement, frame the questions as genuine curiosity rather than accusations. For example, don’t ask why something takes so much time. Instead, frame it as an offer to help improve the process.

If you worry that employees might be reluctant to answer with honest critiques of the company, offer an anonymous survey to ease their concerns. You can prepare different questions for each department and provide open-ended prompts. It might reveal issues you never imagined. This inside peek at your own business will also allow you to gauge other factors, such as company culture, department efficiency and overall engagement.

In addition, this will give you a chance to review your productivity goals. Are they achievable? Are they too low? Getting the right balance will allow you to maximize your productivity while avoiding employee burnout.

Best software for tracking business productivity

Productivity monitoring software is crucial when managing remote employees but can also benefit a close-knit office crew.

Employee monitoring software

There are a number of employee monitoring software tools that can give you a detailed view of each employee’s workday. You can track employee workflow, including attendance, daily hours, productivity levels, work habits and reporting.

Productivity monitoring software shouldn’t be used as 24/7 surveillance. It should be a tool to build relationships, learn employee strengths and weaknesses, and achieve goals. Employees should still be allowed personal time and breaks to decompress throughout the day.

Be transparent about the monitoring, engage employees in company-wide initiatives and encourage workers when goals are met. Investing in the best employee monitoring software can reduce turnover and save time and money.

Time and attendance software

Having a remote or hybrid workforce can increase productivity but only if there is some accountability. Know when remote or hybrid employees are working by using one of the best time and attendance software solutions. If you have multiple shifts, consider using a top employee scheduling software to ensure coverage, minimize overtime and distribute hours to employees fairly.

Project management software

Project management software such as Slack, Microsoft Teams and Asana enable easy communication and project management within teams. Project goals are created and assigned, with prerequisites noted so that everything needed immediately can be done first.

Sales and marketing software

Sales is arguably one of your business’s most important areas, so it is important to maximize productivity in your sales team. Keep detailed notes on each customer and prospect, personalize communications, and monitor sales reps’ progress with one of the best CRM software choices. You can also benefit from a hub for all of your marketing efforts. You can see our top product choices with our HubSpot review and Oracle NetSuite review.

Jennifer Dublino contributed to this article.