Time itself appears to be infinite; however, the hours in a workday aren’t. Every business has a finite number of hours in every cycle to achieve its objectives. The allocation of physical and financial resources may vary from company to company; but, everyone has to work within the same hours. Your business may not have the same financial resources as a competitor. Still, you can close that gap by using your time more efficiently. Your firm’s ability to leverage this advantage depends on your team’s quality and efficiency.
The typical entrepreneur spends a lot more time thinking about their product/service or managing their capital. Much less thought is given to optimizing their teams, and it shows. The average worker only spends 34% to 40% of their workday doing productive, skilled labour. For a company with a group of 10 employees, that’s 160 to 264 man-hours lost every week. That’s the equivalent of losing up to a year and a half’s worth of man-hours annually. This wastage could be crippling or fatal to a small firm if you consider the cost of that time in wages, lost production and lost potential sales.
Every small business owner must find a way to maximize the productivity of their team. If you can reclaim just 20% of that lost time, it could mean tens of thousands of dollars saved and tens of thousands more made. Understandably, small business owners spend thousands on courses, software and other tools to improve their productivity. Nevertheless, there are free tools they can leverage to achieve measurable progress.
Asana is an application that fulfils this need. It allows business owners to create projects, organize tasks in those projects, track progress and create teams remotely. You can also manage assignments and projects in a list for simplicity or on a Kanban board for better visualization. The search feature makes sure that you always have information, past or present, at your fingertips.
Having all the tasks laid out with progress levels visible removes the need to meet to establish objectives. You won’t need to interrupt an employee to check on their progress. These features are excellent for transparency, as anyone can see what tasks are complete, in progress or to be completed. Asana even eliminates task redundancy by allowing you to place tasks in multiple projects and place a team member in on several tasks/projects. This works well for all kinds of firms, especially those that employ remote workers. Asana can also be integrated with other free applications to automate functions and increase the utility of the application to your company.
Leveraging just the free features of Asana can help you limit those lost hours. This is just one of the apps we cover in our software playbook.
If you’re reading this during work hours, you’re already losing time and opportunity in this competitive environment. Fortunately, you don’t have to do all the work improving your team’s efficiency. Our team at Dominate Tech can help you reclaim some of those lost hours and improve your output.
Stay tuned for more tips on our next blog post. Don’t hesitate to improve your small business’ efficiency! Book a consultation with Dominate Tech today!