Improving work efficiency can have a direct positive impact on a company’s bottom line. However simple it may sound, achieving better work efficiency is not always easy.
This article will investigate the different ways you can help your staff gain efficiency for the benefit of your organization.
Why is workplace efficiency important?
What makes you efficient at work? In simple words, you are most efficient at work when you get the most out of your day, with the smallest input possible.
Efficiency is important in the workplace. Some might even claim that workplace efficiency is the key to achieving corporate goals. When your staff is efficient, they are automatically more productive. They have the time, energy and resources to get their tasks done and their projects fulfilled.
A company with efficient staff is more likely to become more profitable than one with inefficient working habits. Workplace efficiency is therefore interesting for management.
It should also be a focus for employees. When work efficiency leads to increased profits, chances are resources will be reinvested in the company’s resources, including salaries. It can turn out to be a true win-win scenario.
How to increase workplace productivity
There are many ways to get more out of your working day. For example, you would like to achieve more in a specific time frame, you can start with 7 basic planning skills:
- Set up realistic goals - not necessarily one goal for the day. You rather set smaller measurable goals that will lead the way to a larger end goal.
- Group tasks - start with an overview of all your tasks and see which tasks can be done simultaneously or which tasks depend on each other.
- Ignore - to get the most out of your day and achieve your goals, you must keep the eyes on “your” ball and not let yourself be distracted by colleagues or other tasks. Identify important tasks and prioritize them.
- Plan for breaks - nobody expects you to work restlessly until tasks are achieved. Time optimization is crucial but taking a short break can allow you to work better and faster afterwards.
- Create the best routine - work efficiency is often the result of effective and well oiled work routines.
- Work environment - people working in an environment that they like are more likely to be productive. Indulge yourself with a nicely designed office and pleasant music.
- Fill up the entire day - in other words use all your time. Make sure you have small tasks you can do if you only have a limited amount of time left. A happy employee is a more efficient employee.
These few tips will help you increase team efficiency and you gain in employee productivity.
How are work efficiency and data integration linked?
Besides the wonders of project management and project planning, there are other ways to achieve work productivity. Having reliable data to work with is one of them.
Business owners should remember that team members’ productivity and efficiency is most often related to having accurate data to work with.
Inaccurate data and errors due to double data entry can make it difficult for your staff to trust data. If you want to increase efficiency in your company, you need to deliver a high level of data accuracy.
In a world where big data has become a reality, companies often collect data from an impressive number of different sources. Today, work efficiency is as much about data efficiency as it is about employee productivity.
Data efficiency refers to the processes that make data available to a company’s workforce. These processes could be: data storage, data access, data filtration, data sharing or data integration.
When data flows seamlessly between different data sources, the risk for inaccurate data is reduced to close to nothing. Manual double data entries are removed and your staff has access to one single truth.
Example: increase work efficiency with data integration
Would you like to get 60% of your working time back? This is what Expedeon experienced after integrating their systems. Expedon uses both Salesforce and a Microsoft Dynamics ERP solution. They achieved considerable benefits after connecting them using RapidiOnline.
Rely on your data every day
Expedeon is a leading and rapidly expanding provider of equipment and reagents for drug developers and other molecular biology companies, with a direct-to-end-user sales model that focuses on streamlining the workflow of their customers. After implementing Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics NAV, their needs were simple, yet imperative: “We rely on this data all day, every day, so it has to be accurate, and the system has to be up all the time."
Because Expedon has a lot of data from their customers, they have to maintain a high level of security. They achieve that, and much more. Their CRM manager is thrilled “I used to spend all my time producing reports with data from multiple sources, including Microsoft Dynamics NAV and Salesforce, but now that we have integrated Salesforce with NAV using RapidiOnline, I’ve got 60% of my former day back.”
