Entrepreneur Resources Your source for small business information
There are so many aspects of our business that demand we take a magnifying glass to the processes. Whether you are trying to instigate customer loyalty or provide a better business for your employees to thrive, the solutions are always about making things simpler, not more complicated. This is why streamlining your business tasks is critical. You may think that you are taking many steps out of the process, but you could always benefit from taking a few more out. With this in mind, here are a few ways that you can streamline your tasks.
Plugins
A very simple thing, but when you are using plugins, you are taking those steps out of the process that, over time, adds up. You may be using programs like Autotask, and there are many Autotask plugins you can use. It’s important to think about plugins as a way to keep your employees on one screen. The more add-ons or plugins you have, the fewer reasons people need to step away, this means all those little tasks are instantly removed.
A VoIP System
Your employees are going to use a diverse range of ways to communicate, from email to phone, and if you are trying to streamline your processes, VoIP systems are full of fantastic features that your small business can utilize. You can use VoIP services as a way to send voice messages via email, which becomes invaluable when you start to think about the typing speed of an average employee. Not everybody is a trained secretary that can type up to 60 to 70 words per minute. In fact, the average typing speed is approximately 40 words per minute.
When you think about the amount of time wasted on sending emails, and not just email themselves but the endless back and forths associated with them, a VoIP system can cut the fat quickly. When we start to think about the right ways to communicate with specific members of our team, we’ve always got to recognize the chain of the conversation as well. When there are endless back and forths, this is either highlighting that employees are not communicating effectively, but they are also potentially communicating they have a lot of time to waste!
Voice Typing Software
This is an invaluable tool for bloggers. For anybody that needs to create an endless stream of words, either for web copy or they don’t have the typing speed in their fingers, voice typing is invaluable. A lot can be said about the benefits of using voice typing. The first and most important one is that because the average typing speed is around 40 words per minute, voice typing software can easily interpret the words you are saying in real time and put them on the screen for you.
In addition, you can voice-type grammar such as full stops and commas. The toughest aspect of incorporating voice typing into your team is that they may not necessarily feel like they can communicate what they want to say. The benefit of people physically typing is that it gives them the opportunity to think about what they want to say before they say it. Voice typing allows you to have more of a stream-of-consciousness approach. This means that bloggers trying to communicate with their own manner of speech can instantly reel off hundreds of words. There are fantastic voice recognition software packages out there. If you are hoping to streamline your business tasks, having a member of staff use voice software could instantly make life a lot easier. However, in order to make the most of this software, the individual needs to become accustomed to, not just their own voice or their thought processes, but they also need structure the content effectively.
Automation
Finally, the most critical way to streamline your business tasks is to automate many aspects of your processes in-house. Automation is something that everybody is trying to do in one way or another. There are things that can make your back office functions easier. You can automate specific admin practices, and even larger businesses have benefited from automating a number of critical functions. However, it’s important to remember that you can’t rely on automation to do absolutely everything.
Using automation is about pinpointing the tasks that can benefit from reducing the steps to the finite components and effectively programming a system to do the work for them. There are AI-assisted tools out there that can make things easier, especially when it comes to fine-tuning documents, but it’s critical to remember that with all of these tools, they are worth nothing if they are not benefiting your business. We need to increase productivity, improve communication, and improve our bottom line, and tools are only critical when used correctly.
