If you want to increase employee productivity and ensure your business operations run smoothly, business organization is essential. In fact, most business owners will agree that being more organized actually contributes to higher profitability. While some of us are naturally organized people, others need a nudge in the right direction. Here are a few easy things you can do to make your business more organized.
Get Your Paperwork in Order
Although a lot of your processes will be carried out digitally, you will no doubt still have some paperwork in the form of receipts, contracts, warranties, and bills. Make sure you regularly file away anything that you receive by file type, color coding, or alphabetically. Have a check once a month to see whether anything that is out of date or no longer relevant can be shredded. If you need to keep a lot of your documents in paper form and for a number of years for legal reasons, consider secure off-site storage so that you aren’t taking up office space unnecessarily.
Tidy Up Your PC
Many of us are guilty of saving everything to our desktops and deciding that will we get around to organizing the files and folders later. Our download folders are probably still full of app installers that we haven’t used in two years, and it takes us a good amount of time to find something of importance whenever we need it. Rather than trying to create a system that is color-coded and cross-referenced, it is a lot easier to find a system that you will actually stick to.
For example, you could file everything according to a project or client, or you could choose a date-based structure whereby you create a folder for the year and 12 subfolders for each month within it. For more information on how this can work, click here.
Automate Your Workflows
It is more than likely that your business consists of many manual processes that could, in fact, be automated. When processes are completed manually, they naturally take more time, which leads to lower levels of productivity. Take a good look at how your business is run and the tasks performed by your team members. For example, could you make use of a content management program that will allow your social media posts to be written ahead of time and published on a regular schedule of your choosing? Additionally, you may find that your customer data is held in separate apps that don’t talk to each other. If you use Autopilot for in-app messages and Mailchimp for your newsletter, you can head over to piesync.com to start syncing the customer data automatically. Piesync allows you full control over how your contacts will be organized.
As well as the tips above, you can try completely changing the way you work by aiming for a paperless environment or changing the layout of your office to a design that improves productivity. If you want to grow your business in 2020 and beyond, organization is key.