[Denise McGill is back, with another smart guest post. Today, she wants to help you save some time in your day.]
How many productive hours are lost in a typical day due to lack of training, standardization or outdated materials? Utilizing time management and having the tools to be productive can cause fewer headaches for business owners and increase employee job satisfaction. Removing the roadblocks and frustrations that employees come across, makes them more efficient.
If you or an employee is spending longer than necessary to prepare correspondence or a spreadsheet for a meeting in the morning, then these five tips will increase performance and save time normally lost during the workday.
Create templates or master forms for email correspondence – This is a huge time saver whether you are a sole proprietor or a large corporation. For instance if you have a technical support department and find the same questions popping up over and over again, design a standard email response to answer those questions. Of course, you are free to tweak those emails as necessary, but a template gives a foundation to build on. A well thought out email response presents a standardized response, appears professional and eliminates spelling errors as well
Include an automatic email signature – Full contact information should be included with every email sent. You can easily utilize this function within your email software. Don’t make customers search for contact information.
Learn to use the software on your computer – Hours of productivity and time management can be lost in a day if you have employees that cannot adequately use the basic functions available on a spreadsheet or word document. Not knowing how to format or use basic formulas can have an employee laboring over a project needlessly and ultimately missing deadlines. If the budget is tight, have an internal employee teach the basics of the computer software your company uses – it is well worth the day spent to bring everyone up to speed.
Prepare job function manuals – Lose the tribal knowledge mentality. As employees leave the business, they take their knowledge with them. Job descriptions with step-by-step instructions on how to perform the job should be created so new employees can step right in without skipping a beat. Nothing is more frustrating to a new hire than winging it until they figure out their new job the hard way.
Delete or archive outdated material on the computer – Are there five versions of the same document on your computer – each with slight variations to them? Using outdated material can cause havoc internally and well as with customers. Be sure to archive or delete information that is no longer in use. It is also handy to use the “view header footer function” in your document to insert creation or revision dates on forms. This assures you are using the most current version of the document.
Standardized information, updated documents, and clearly defined job functions are key to a smooth running business.
About Denise:
Denise McGill is a freelance copywriter specializing in catalog product description, copy makeovers, web content, landing pages, promotional materials, articles and more. Visit her website at http://mcgillcopywriting.com for more information on giving your business the competitive edge.
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Love these ideas, especially the email templates and job function manuals. To extend the latter idea, one problem I see some small businesses having, particularly if they have employees/consultants that may not work in the same office, is an inadequate sharing of knowledge and information. Google docs can provide a decent solution to maintain central repositories of knowledge but I’ve noticed it requires a shift in thinking. People don’t automatically think to share the information they have or to consider whether it could be of value to someone else on the team. Do you have any other suggestions on ways teams can share knowledge or communicate more effectively amongst themselves?
These are such simple, easy tips & commonsense, but people don’t seem to follow them! Great post! Thank you!
“Learn to use the software on your computer – Hours of productivity and time management can be lost in a day if you have employees that cannot adequately use the basic functions available on a spreadsheet or word document. Not knowing how to format or use basic formulas can have an employee laboring over a project needlessly and ultimately missing deadlines. If the budget is tight, have an internal employee teach the basics of the computer software your company uses – it is well worth the day spent to bring everyone up to speed.”
A couple of comments there. My main job is on-site support. If you teach people how to use the current version of brand X wordprocessor, you’re not saving any time or money, because you’ll have to do it all over again in two years when the next version comes out and moves buttons and menus around. Training efforts should center around the general things that most wordprocessors, spreadsheets, etc have in common.
This equips the user to figure out the specifics of a particular brand/version of software for himself/herself.
Also: templates aren’t only for e-mail. Chances are, you have a few kinds of documents and spreadsheets that you use regularly. Instead of having people manually create them from scratch, create templates using styles instead of manual formatting, and then install the templates on each person’s computer. This will give your documents a professional look, without a lot of time tweaking formatting on each document. (Manual formatting is barbaric, like “bleeding” someone to stop a headache.)
The comments are as relevant as the post. I’m on page 40 of our Inn’s operating guide and I’m not sure how many more trees will die before it is done.
For Lucy, if the team works on a project or event plan a follow up meeting the day after completion for rehash. Have a neutral person or tape player record comments both good and bad about how the process was handled, what could have gone better, what time line would be sensible if the event was repeated etc. This type of session gives you a template for planning and problem solving repeat projects or similar events.
Hi Denise,
I enjoyed your guest post on time savers. We can all use more time in our day! I thought I’d chime in with some resource links from Microsoft. They’re trying to tailor help to the small business community and they have a couple of tools / links below that might be worth checking out.
Hope this helps!
Deidra
The Microsoft SMB Outreach Team
v-dejow@microsoft.com
Link:
http://www.microsoft.com/smallbusiness/hub.mspx
Microsoft Small Business Center
http://www.pinpoint.microsoft.com/en-US/
Microsoft Pinpoint tool to help you find technical experts and special applications