Improving efficiency in business in 22 different ways

We asked business owners and managers to share how they’ve increased efficiency in business. The following list consists of actionable and practical tips that you could implement in your firm.

Employ CRM systems in your business infrastructure

Clarify the core elements of your meetings

1. Number (the number of meetings you run): Do we really need this meeting (or could it be run on an ad-hoc basis, only if required?)
2. Frequency (the cadence that each meeting occurs): Do we need to run the meeting as often as we do?
3. Duration (the amount of time each meeting takes): Does the meeting need to run as long as it does?
4. People (the number of team members needed to attend each meeting): Who do we actually need to attend the meeting? (with the ability to bring in non-core individuals on an as-needs basis)

Evian Gutman, Founder & CEO of Ringcommend

Motivate your employees

The best way to improve business efficiency is to motivate employees to want to work. By creating a pleasant work environment, and by providing motivation and proper guidance, you make your workers want to please you, rather than making them feel forced to.Force is not a good motivator – aspiration is.

Let your employees know what you need from them, set them up for success, and provide encouragement and praise when they reach their set-up goals. Us humans are receptive to the feeling of accomplishment by default, which is why recognizing someone’s effort and hard work can trigger a significant improvement when it comes to business efficiency.

Janni Nilsson, Managing Editor at Resumoo

Have meetings with an agenda and a clear direction

There are two keys to having efficient meetings: having an agenda at the start and having actionable steps at the end. A meeting is useless without an agenda. You have to have points of discussion ready, so you’re not wasting time on topics that can easily be communicated through chat or email.

At the end of the meeting, actionable steps must be set in place so your team knows what to do right after the meeting is done. Many people leave meetings with no clear direction in mind, so it’s crucial for you to set these things so tasks can be done more efficiently and deadlines could be met.

Bradley Keys, Marketing Director at PatchMD

Implement self-pay kiosks

If your brick and mortar business involves B2C sales, the least you could do to improve business efficiency is to install self-pay kiosks. 

Impulsify’s self-pay kiosk technology is designed to automate purchases and provide a faster checkout procedure for retail outlets, while also providing minimal cashier interaction, and avoiding cross-contamination. With multiple kiosks for guests to scan-and-go with minimal interaction, no cash and no touching of customer’s food provides reduced cross-contamination. This will result in increased sales and returning customers.

Janine Williams, CEO of Impulsify Inc

Seek expert advice

Businesses start with passion. Then, they grow and become an operation. It is at this stage that business owners lose control and efficiency in business decreases. We grew from 2 founders to 12 employees quickly and completely lost control of our processes. We delivered more work but made less profit. In fact, we were chasing our tails and were completely wild. Why? Because we had zero understanding of how to manage a business that had transformed from a passion into an operation.

Today, we manage 28% more clients with the same workforce and revolutionised processes. By contracting an external expert, they were able to objectively look at our business from angles we could not see while being so heavily invested. We learned that the best business owners understand when to get their hands dirty and when to concede to an expert. Now, we heed this experience for other areas of our business.

Steven Lord, Marketing Manager at Digital Next

Adopt the OKR methodology

One way to improve business efficiency is to adopt the OKR methodology (Objectives and Key Results). A collaborative approach to goals fosters transparency and visibility, helps organizations stay aligned, and improves overall efficiency and productivity.

With the major shift to remote work during the COVID-19 pandemic, we’re seeing an increase in companies implementing surveillance and tracking software, believing that it would improve team productivity and efficiency while everyone was working from home. But ramping up the use of software to monitor what your employees do all day isn’t the answer. There have been

multiple studies that extrinsic motivation isn’t effective for knowledge workers. Employee surveillance and micromanaging software incite fear that employees aren’t being productive, adding additional pressure and destroying morale across the team. Digital supervision not only removes privacy, but it breaks the trust built between managers and employees.

Enter OKRs. They help to focus and align the organization, as well as develop a set of productive behaviors that will create an intrinsically motivated culture. Through the OKR process, employees define the outcomes they’ll achieve, which empowers autonomy and ultimately motivation.

Alicia Hunt, Director of Marketing at Koan

Structure the problem-solving process

At Cardsmith, we involve our entire team, and use our own visual tool to follow a step-by-step problem-solving process which helps us boost efficiency in business:

1. Brainstorm all the problems. 
2. Estimate what value would be realized if we solved each problem. 
3. Brainstorm solutions and estimate the cost to solving each problem. 
4. Look at the problems and solutions holistically to find synergies and possible shared root causes. 
5. Combine and rank possible projects. 
6. Select projects to execute, making sure to capture baseline metrics. 
7. Execute on the highest priority projects. 
8. Measure the results of the change by evaluating changes in the identified metrics.

Monica Borrell, Founder and CEO of Cardsmith

Move meetings online

Our company has found that the best way we can improve business efficiency is by moving meetings online.

Webinars have become a part of our daily routine. It is an effective way to communicate with customers, potential customers, website visitors, or other interested parties. You can also host internal webinars for employees instead of seminars. A webinar can include everything a regular seminar includes: lectures, conversations, debates, and workshops.

From my experience, if a regular meeting is supposed to take an hour, it will take two hours, and even more for the host. Another upside is that travel time for participants is reduced, better yet nonexisting. With online meetings, you simply click a link and you’re there.

Kristian Rasmussen, CEO & Founder at Ultify

Use Google Workspace a.k.a. G Suite

Using G Suite has been a game-changer for our business. It means multiple contributors can work on our campaign documents at the same time without things getting lost as had happened with previous cloud solutions. Tasks, internal discussions, calendars, everything we need is accessible within one or two platforms which is perfect. 

Over time we refined our processes and identified any double handling that was happening and continue to streamline and automate as much as possible so that our team can truly focus on being creative. The fewer people have to jump between conflicting tasks, the more efficient they are because they aren’t as mentally fatigued.

Natalie Athanasiadis, Founder of Ormi Media

Outsource the things you dislike doing

For years now, and even in these uncertain times, I have exceeded my business goals. The best expert tip I can give that has helped me succeed is outsourcing the parts of my business that I don’t love or am not an expert at. So my best advice is not to be afraid to invest in contractors with highly specialized skill sets. 

This goes for any part of the business that you and your team don’t have the expertise, is project-based, or does not warrant hiring full-time staff. Hiring the right people for the right job is essential for growth. Just make sure that you do your due diligence with verified referrals or reviews of the services offered.

Jessica Randhawa, Owner and Head Chef at The Forked Spoon

Set realistic targets

When the bulk of our employees are working from home, it is difficult to monitor them or micromanage them in any way. Instead, we would set certain realistic targets for them to achieve every week. We are flexible on when they do their work (they do not have to work 9-5), so long as they are able to meet their weekly targets. 

Such flexibility also helps to keep our employees happy and ultimately increase our efficiency in business.

Kim Chan, Founder and CEO of DocPro

Invest in top-shelf tools

Some of these tools have allowed us to condense tasks that would take multiple days into an SOP that takes mere hours monthly. In our experience, many business owners we consult with

initially shy away from top-tier tools because of their larger price-tag, but once they understand the time-savings coupled with the value of their own time as an owner or manager, they demonstrate complete buy-in. 

Our best advice to improve business efficiency is to make the investment in top-shelf tools for your tasks, and dedicate the time to integrate them into your daily workflow and company SOPs.

Connor Whitman, Founder of Connor Whitman Digital Strategy Consulting

Automate the contract workflow

Contracts are the lifeblood of any business. Still, contracts are done manually with old-school tools like MS Word and email. With this, teams like HR, sales, procurement are dependent on the legal team and not able to run their business operations efficiently to close deals and mitigate risks at the same time.

One advice for boosting business efficiency is automating the contract workflow. Every business can automate the most frequently used document templates and delegate them to other business units to self-serve and be confident in the documents’ compliance. To speed up the workflow even more, further contract negotiation can be done from the same place so contract parties should not jump to emails and upload/ download documents many times. The parties also stay in this one-window environment to get contracts digitally signed.

With this new way of contracting, business teams are totally independent and equipped with necessary documents to get deals closed whereas lawyers on more high-value legal advisory.

Polina Medvedieva, Marketing Manager at Avokaado

Don’t be afraid to automate every possible task

We use automation for mundane tasks such as status reporting, employee tracking, task distribution, etc. Having smart people on you team is crucial but sometimes even they cannot keep up with the demand of the tasks at had. That’s why we are going for predictive analysis to make our systems smarter. We are trying to be future-ready by incorporating predictive analytics to solve problems proactively.

Kamal Thakur, COO of Cerebrum Infotech

Practice the Pomodoro Technique

To make the long story short, we implemented the classic Pomodoro Technique. Every 30 mins to an hour, they have to get up from their chairs and do whatever they want for 5 mins – stretching or making coffee is up to them. This helped the team revive their spirits and were able to do their jobs more efficiently.

Stewart Dunlop, Founder of LinkBuilder.io

Switch to an industry-specific CRM

• getting a hold of sales leads quickly 
• following up on leads consistently and 
• making our salespeople more productive. 

I had a hunch that making a change in our CRM software would make a big difference. I found CRM software called Velocify that specialized in our industry and we decided to make a switch. It had an immediate impact on our sales and hasn’t stopped since. Our sales and close ratio improved over 50% instantly and I know it was directly attributed to the new CRM software.

Stephen Halasnik, Managing Partner at Financing Solutions

Measure, measure, measure

This implementation has allowed our team to very accurately estimate project costs, maintain profitability, and instil detailed expectation outlines for our staff. As an added benefit, the operational procedure training modules allow us to quickly onboard new team members.

Matt Berman, Founder and CEO of Emerald Digital

Optimise your product portfolio

Illia Termeno, Founder of CMO Consultant

Map the workflow

Mapping workflow allows the business owner and team to think through their business process and identify tasks that are duplicative, actions that can be automated, and potential for collaboration across business silos. I’ve done this in my own businesses and work with my startup and small business clients to do the same. 

Moreover, mapping workflow is the gateway to developing operations or training manuals that save time and provide clarity when hiring additional employees. This is also the basis to create templates for various business functions that promote consistent communication and quality of service. 

Alexandra Cohen, Founder of ANC Consult

Having visibility of your workforce costs

This provides the employer with two advantages: Ensuring that all workforce expenditures match the organization’s goals. And comparing spending over time to determine whether it has increased or decreased. As a result, business owners are able to make much more data-driven decisions.

Eynat Guez, Founder of Papaya Global

Teach team members to self-manage

This philosophy will also impact team members’ self-motivation and, consequently, their productivity. When a skilled worker learns to self-manage his assigned tasks, it will reduce communication timing and avoid possible management bottlenecks.

Jose Gomez, CTO and Founder of Evinex

Conclusion

The increase in efficiency in business more often than not has a direct impact on decreasing operating costs, boosting productivity and generating more profits. It’s up to the managers to identify where business efficiency is leaking from, and close the hole.

What is a data breach?

Data breaches should not be confused with cyber attacks. A data breach is the result of a cyber attack. Meanwhile, a cyber attack is the means to access the data. As you can imagine, penetration testing services are essential for for preventing data breach, so its important to partner up with a pen testing company.

Cybercriminals often use viruses (such as Trojans) or phishing (such as email scams) to gain access to information. You might receive a phishing email that looks like it’s coming from a trusted bank. Even worse, during the pandemic, hackers forged emails from healthcare institutions. They expected people would more likely click on a link regarding their well-being.

The results were devastating. 60% of small businesses did not recover after a successful cyber attack. The pandemic revealed huge cybersecurity issues. Many companies were not prepared to face these new challenges.

Cybersecurity is a complex and costly process. But there are easy and affordable steps you can take right now. Keep in mind that cybercriminals often look for the easiest target. So if you implement the steps outlined below, you can significantly minimize the risks of becoming a victim.

4 ways to protect your company

Here are some proven ways to help your company safe from cyber attacks.

Protect your data

Storing data in unencrypted form is a big mistake in this day and age. If a hacker gains access to your or your employees’ devices, unencrypted data is like a gold pot. There’s nothing worse than companies storing their client’s data in unencrypted form.

Client data often includes banking details and personally identifiable information (name and surname, birth date, etc.). Cybercriminals can use this data to impersonate clients or target them with advanced phishing schemes. One way or another, the victim can rightfully blame the company that did not take care of data security.

Marriott hotel has suffered from numerous data leaks. In 2018 they had 5.3 million unencrypted passport numbers leaked. It was a significant blow to the company’s reputation, showing how poorly it treated data security. Even worse, they got sued by customers. If the data were encrypted, cybercriminals would have had no way of accessing it, preventing massive legal troubles.

Use backups

We mentioned ransomware gangs that use their own encryption to hold your data for ransom. One way to solve this is to backup your files. A backup will create a copy of your data and store it in a secure cloud. So even if you lose access to the data on your devices, you can use a backup to restore it. Keep in mind that cloud services can also lack sufficient security measures. It’s best to backup your data in encrypted form. Even if it leaks from the cloud, there will be no way to exploit it if it’s encrypted.

Train your staff

Education is the first line of defense when it comes to cybersecurity. You should instruct your staff on the proper use of passwords. You should also train them on how to spot a phishing email. Most people can identify the most obvious ones, but nowadays, hackers can forge professional, convincing letters that even the best of us can fall for. Learning to identify phishing emails is not hard, but it takes time and initiative.

Set network administration rights

You should limit access to crucial business and client data. There’s no need for all employees to have the same amount of access to the corporate network. If limitations are not set and one device gets breached, cybercriminals get full access. Implement several access layers and set up a network administrator to manage them. A great way to start is to follow a layered cybersecurity model to maximize the security of different network segments.

Conclusion

A single data breach can be enough to bring even the most successful company down. That’s why businesses should protect their data at all costs and be careful with who and what they trust online.