Improving your productivity whilst working from home 

22 April 2020

In previous blog posts, we’ve discussed the three pillars of productivity: engagement, process improvement and integration. Now is a great time to revisit these principles, and how they’re even more important for remote working situations and improving your productivity.

Engagement 

Now is probably the most time to improve your employee engagement. People are literally isolated from one another and engaging with people a lot less than they would usually. This can have a huge impact on your team’s mental wellbeing. People can lose focus and become disenfranchised.  

So how can you keep your team engaged at a time like this?  

1. Communicate regularly with the team; let them know how the business is doing and remind them about your values and aspirations as a business.  
2. Open the lines of communication by ensuring you have regular video calls and an instant messenger to allow people to maintain their relationships inside the workplace.
3. Team events don’t have to stop because you’re not able to get together. Our virtual payday pints and quizzes are proving more popular as people need that social engagement. 

Your team will remember how you handled this situation. Keeping them engaged and informed during a time of crisis such as this will support their productivity. 

Read the original Engagement: Pillar of Productivity article here.

Process improvement 

You’ll probably have heard a lot of people talk about now being the best time to work on the business. They’re right. Whether your operating with a skeleton staff, or that your customer facing work is simply not taking as much time, use this time wisely. 

Now is the perfect time to ask yourself three questions: 

1. How do we operate? Map out your sales process, finance process or marketing processes to truly understand how the business works. 
2. Why do we operate like this? Are there underpinning reasons that mean we MUST work a certain way? Challenge the norms in your business to see if there is a better way. 
3. What impact will change have? Change is uncomfortable, but change is good. Change is what will make you stand out from your competition. Whether you’re more efficient in your service delivery, or more effective in winning work – these changes will lead to growth. 

Process improvement should be incremental, getting into a change mentality will help to continue to evolve your business. But utilising this time to focus on some initial process improvements could put you in a stronger place when the current crisis ends. 

Read the original Process Improvement: Pillar of Productivity article here.

Integration 

Our original integration article focused on the importance of only doing something once. If you enter the data into your CRM system, it should automatically generate invoices and work schedules for your team.  

With the physical distance between business functions now meaning you can’t physically hand a file over, many people will be even more reliant on email inboxes to manage their to do lists.  

Automating processes through integrations will massively reduce your reliance on emails and reduce human error, improving your productivity as people no longer need to enter data in multiple places. 

Read the original Integration: Pillar of Productivity article here.

 

The principles of productivity remain the same even in the current climate. There’s a big opportunity for businesses to review their processes and improve the way that you do business.  

If you’d like to discuss how you could improve your productivity, please get in touch. You can do so by calling the office on 01772 823734 or selecting one of the options below:

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