Efficiency is a must in the business world. The improved-productivity trend is just as important and relevant for small companies as it is for big ones. Develop your efficiency and you develop both your profitability and your satisfaction at work. But before you get started, let’s take a look to better understand exactly what efficiency is and its advantages for you and your business.
What is efficiency?
Efficiency means going beyond effectiveness and reaching optimized results that will increase your company’s profitability without increasing in-house resources. In today’s world, it’s in a company’s best interest to be efficient if it wants to stand out in the marketplace and increase its value.
Efficiency is worth more than effectiveness
An effective company meets its financial projections, but an efficient company does more with the same resources. It can double, triple or even quadruple its annual sales figure. Efficient companies are more successful with their clients, staff and profitability.
The opposite of efficiency
Efficiency doesn’t mean overexploiting resources. Rather, it’s the strategic use of a business process or task that creates added value. It doesn’t mean working harder or faster. In the long run, that just creates workplace anxiety and is unproductive. Efficiency means creating more by working smarter. Planning is key to ensuring efficiency.
WizeBA’s recommendations
Every hour worked is an opportunity to generate profits. Yet, creating more with the same resources calls for a solid strategy. To ensure that you and your business are efficient, you have to start by taking a hard look at your business processes and optimizing them. This is where a business analyst can step in to share expertise and bring a fresh perspective on your challenges. This guide will get you started with questions like: Am I efficient in every moment of my work week? Or, am I repeatedly wasting time and profits? The answer to these questions will show just how efficient you are at work.
How can you become efficient?
- Plan and excel. Prioritizing key activities with added value will directly affect your productivity. Take a step back to analyze your business processes and their shortcomings. Target a few—the worst—and work on them with the right resources. WizeBA’s process mapping, available at wizeba.com, will help you do this exercise.
- Outsourcing is a strategy SMEs use to concentrate on billable tasks. It’s best to delegate tasks with no added value such as your accounts payable. The extra time will make room for income-generating activities.
- Communicate well. Clear communication is a key to success for all companies, employees and business partners. Expressing your position and objectives articulately, without leaving room for ambiguity or interpretation, can save time and eliminate unproductivity.
- Organization pays off! The word is “organization,” and it should be applied everywhere! This can mean tasks like structuring your work environment, redefining processes that create production bottlenecks, keeping your inbox tidy and your agenda up to date or modernizing a dysfunctional technological tool.
- Prioritize what counts.In the day to day, efficiency requires workers and entrepreneurs to come back to their main tasks and to structure the rest. It means not getting tangled up in administration and eliminating the grey areas that cause you to lose time and become frustrated.
An analyst leads you back to what’s most important
If you want to make the most of your time but don’t know where to start, a business analyst can be a valuable partner. An analyst will offer you solutions to the issues you’re facing and, by giving you optimized work methods from the start, ensures you avoid costly trial and error in developing your business’ efficiency. And process mapping can give you a new take on your business’s development and the results of an efficiency-oriented strategy.
To learn more, visit wizeba.com.