After a typically quiet August for the construction industry, September tends to come roaring in to bring about a busy autumn period for many businesses, and the industry as a whole. This presents the perfect time for you to utilise all of the preparation work that you did in August and ensure that you have the jumpstart on your competitors when things get busy. As the friendly experts within the construction industry, we would like to provide some of our top tips on how you can increase your business’s efficiency, to ensure the best return for your sales and marketing teams.
Let’s start from the beginning, what is business efficiency?
According to Indeed, business efficiency indicates how much a company can produce in relation to time, money and resources. In this case, efficiency is how well a business can transform materials, capital and labour into products and services that generate revenue.
How can you develop efficiencies in your business?
Efficiency in business can be measured in multiple ways. Whether you are looking to increase the efficiency of your processes, labour or ROI our below top tips will outline how you can get started.
1. Analyse employee productivity
You are only as strong as the team around you. So start there, find out how productive your workforce is. Can they take on more tasks? Are they overloaded with too many tasks, which in turn is affecting their productivity? Sit down with your supervisory team, those who communicate with your employees’ day in and day out and analyse how you can boost productivity.
2. Automate
Despite automation having a higher start up cost, it is one of the quickest and easiest ways to improve efficiency. Through automation you can save future costs and save employee time, allowing them to complete higher priority tasks.
Take time and evaluate which processes your company can automate, as automation is not the answer for all businesses.
3. Encourage team collaboration
Ensuring your employees feel comfortable to share their thoughts and feedback with the rest of the team is crucial for an efficient workforce. Encouraging team collaboration will not only create a more satisfied workforce, but it will also allow employees to share their ideas and identify opportunities for improvement.
Set up regular meetings/Teams calls where the team can come together, update each other on what they are doing, ask for help if needed and share their thoughts with the rest of the workforce. Implementing short calls like this allows everyone to be updated and aware of what is happening in all aspects of the team. It is also a quick and easy way you can improve your company’s efficiencies!
4. Build trust
Strong bonds are built through trust. Trusting your workforce to complete their work without a manager watching over them helps to create a better working environment for the employee, where they feel valued and trusted to complete their work.
5. Set clear goals
Having clear goals for your business is vital for success. Ensuring your employees know and understand these goals is equally important for developing efficiencies. What steps are going to take to reach that goal? Why are you taking those steps? The more your team understand exactly what they’re doing and why they’re doing it, the more efficient your business will become.