Entrepreneurs are one of the busiest people. With the constant need to meet consumer demand, they need to figure out the best way to improve workflow productivity and time management strategies to apply to their companies. Especially to those in the online retailing business, every second counts so that they can cater to the modern consumer’s need for fast-paced service and products.
The road to a successful business
A delay in your business’s internal clock can create a domino effect of missed deadlines and negative customer appeal. As a business owner, one of the more significant hurdles that you’ll have to go through is curating effective and productive management of your staff’s time.
In this article, we’ll give you three business practices to help you optimize your business’s workflow.
1. Know and categorize your priorities
Proper time management is a lot about knowing how to prioritize your workflow. Co-founder of Kiva, Jessica Jackley, believes that an entrepreneur’s ability to prioritize is the essential skill in running a business.
One great way to know how to divide your workflow is by categorizing them into groups that rank from the most urgent to the least urgent. You need to factor in a task’s urgency, importance, and value in gauging whether an activity should rank higher or lower in your priority list.
Besides categorizing your tasks according to importance and urgency, it’s also vital that you cut down on non-essential tasks on your list. Within your tasks, you must review if what you planned to do has a significant impact on your business in the long run. Reduce these items in your list as much as possible to avoid putting energy into something that won’t benefit your core responsibilities as a business owner.
2. Avoid giving general directions
One reason that you and your staff will run into time management issues is a lack of direction because of too general instructions. When someone is unsure of the goal’s specifics, they’re most likely to slack off and feel demotivated to accomplish their job.
An excellent way to design the way you give yourself and your staff directives is by following the SMART objective format. The acronym stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-Bound objectives. Once you’re able to answer the need for a SMART objective, you’ll be able to provide a clearer vision and direction to your workflow by having specific key performance indicators (KPI) to follow.
3. Trust in your staff by delegating tasks
Managing and overseeing are two different attitudes, and learning how to differentiate the two will allow you to be a better business owner. Micromanagement is the danger of every entrepreneur, as it prevents you from growing your business at a faster rate.
It is best to delegate tasks to staff that you feel are competent enough for the job. In asking someone to have more responsibility, you should always give them the breakdown of the tasks that they have to do. Be specific about their requirements so that they can also ask the right questions while they’re going through the learning curve of a new routine.
It may be challenging at first to hand over some of your business’s core tasks, but once you’ve shared your trust with your staff, they’ll be able to excel and improve in their designated roles. This allows you to accept larger scale projects and operations by having dependable partners by your side.
Conclusion
The key to employing effective time management strategies is specificity and communication. By having clear and definite objectives, you’ll be able to allow your staff to commit to their tasks with little to no confusion of their purpose. Also, it will allow them to give suggestions and improvements to help your workflow work better in the future.
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