Inefficiency, like rust, never sleeps, and can suddenly creep into any corner of your business. As the owner or leader of a Mexican SME, you probably have basic assets such as cash, human energy, machinery, premises and access to products and services, but the most important aspect and the one that is often ignored is the frequency with which these Assets provide maximum efficiency for the business, especially when resources are limited. Today you will learn how to have an efficient company, its operation and administration capacity building.
Furthermore, vigilance against inefficiency is even more critical for small and medium-sized businesses because the margins of error can be small, and small but constant revenue drains can suddenly reach a tipping point.
So how can your company be more efficient and run a tighter ship? Here are 5 recommendations to achieve it:
Recommendations to make your company efficient
- Establish a business plan
What does your company need to improve? Start by taking a step back and analyze with your employees a business plan with achievable objectives, even with a reasonable deadline.
This is a very important aspect to achieve an efficient company, as it can be considered the starting point for many company activities, since it is where the purpose of the company, the company’s objectives, and the strategies that will allow them to be achieved are established. , the market it addresses, its competition, the strategic alliances it has, the marketing channels, working capital, financing needs, among others.
In addition, the business plan is important because it can be used as a sales tool when seeking to create business relationships with investors or banks, for example.
The important thing is that this plan is kept updated, only in this way will your company be able to maintain its focus, detect new opportunities or threats in the market and have access to new financing options.
- Define objectives and indicators
The second tip to achieve an efficient company is to be clear about your objectives. If you are not aware that what is not measured cannot be controlled. So, what’s the point of preparing a business plan and presenting it to all your collaborators if you’re not going to be able to measure their progress and impact? For a company to be efficient, it requires maintaining control over its various areas.
To achieve the above, it is necessary to establish objectives both at the organizational level, as well as at the department level and for each collaborator. In this way, each worker and each area will be clear about what their responsibilities are and the goals that they must achieve.
What should the objectives be? Each of the objectives must be: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and a period of time in which it will be achieved must be defined.
Likewise, for each objective there must be an indicator whose function will be to measure the degree of compliance with the established goal.
- Define roles and tasks
A third and very important recommendation to make your company efficient is to meet with the main members of each area to communicate the business plan, priorities and most importantly, what is expected of their work, their roles and tasks.
If necessary, set up meetings with each key person to outline the two or three priority tasks, estimate the estimated or expected time for each task, and help them understand the level of quality you expect.
At the same time, allow your employees the freedom to work in the best way possible but, be careful! Don’t let so much freedom and meetings ruin the productivity of your business.
It is a fact that work meetings are necessary to share information and make key decisions, but they can also be a double-edged sword for businesses, especially for those that are just beginning to grow and need to get the most out of time and money. .
Plan these meetings carefully and make sure the people who really need to participate participate. Prepare an agenda oriented to the company’s objectives and summarize each meeting with clear resolutions.
- Invest in training for your employees
Knowledge is power. A company of any size that invests time and money in training its employees is more likely to achieve efficiency in the company and be successful. Therefore, another recommendation that we offer you to make your company more efficient is to invest in your people and keep them happy through knowledge.
A trained employee will obviously always be able to do a better job, while at the same time being more committed and genuinely interested in doing what is good for the company. In fact, a study from the University of Warwick in England revealed that happy and motivated employees tend to be 12% more efficient compared to employees who are not happy and motivated.
Training should not be considered an expense, but should be seen as an investment and as a determining factor for your company to be efficient. Thanks to the above, your collaborators will be more prepared to perform their functions more quickly and you will also be able to take greater advantage of their skills and potential. Therefore, it is advisable to establish training programs based on the needs you observe in your company and your staff. In this way, you will be able to work on the areas of opportunity that currently do not allow your company to achieve the greatest possible efficiency.
- Take advantage of technology
Are you aware of all the processes that can be automated in your business with the help of automation and the efficiency in the company that can be achieved with this?
Many times routine forces us to ignore certain situations that affect the growth of the company and that we have right in front of our eyes, people spend hours on tasks that can be automated and done with a couple of clicks. Can you imagine everything your employees could do during all those hours they spend preparing reports, sending invoices and completing paperwork?
Today there are a large number of technological tools whose objective is to support the various tasks in organizations. Therefore, to be an efficient company, having at least one of them is a requirement since they provide a large number of benefits such as: An ERP business system offers you more optimal processes, greater productivity, elimination of barriers to communication, competitiveness in the market, gives you mobility, helps you make better decisions.
An ERP business system helps you be more productive and achieve efficiency in the company thanks to its extensive functionalities that allow you to automate each area of the business, eliminate communication barriers and be much more competitive in the market.