Companies lose up to 20 to 30% of their annual revenue due to inefficiencies in their work processes. Achieving corporate efficiency is key to maximizing profits.
It also paves the way for fostering a positive and productive work environment. Many companies struggle to achieve corporate efficiency because they lack the factors that come together to create a smooth flow of operations.
In this article, we take a look at the key ingredients every business should have to maximize corporate efficiency at every stage. Read on to learn how you can cultivate these factors to usher in a culture of efficiency and positivity in your company.
5 key ingredients for maximizing corporate efficiency
Corporate inefficiency is the inability to perform business operations in the most optimized manner. This leads to a business spending more resources, time, and effort on tasks and achieving less than desired productivity and outcome out of it.
Some of the major drawbacks of corporate inefficiency are listed below:
- It takes more money and resources to accomplish tasks as there is no standardized process in place.
- It takes longer to accomplish any task, damaging your overall productivity.
- The end results are less than desirable in quality because they were a product of ill-managed processes.
- It hurts the morale of the workers as they’re left to work through repetitive or irrelevant tasks and there is no clear path to follow.
- Businesses fare unfavorably in comparison to their competitors and cannot sustain long-term growth.
To combat this issue, you need to bring order to the way you operate. Start from scratch and review your entire work structure. Identify areas where you’re lacking and the issues that affect the procedures the most.
Given below are the key factors that you need to bring and establish in your work culture to maximize corporate efficiency with ease. Let’s take a look at them in detail.
1. Proper financial planning
According to the 2016 JPMorgan Chase Report, most small businesses only have enough cash flow to cover 27 days of expenses. The ideal is a cash flow that covers over three months of expenses.
This sort of shortsightedness is a result of a lack of financial planning — a staple in corporate inefficiency. To turn this issue around, you need to invest in creating a financial blueprint for your business.
Abacum offers a comprehensive guide to getting started with financial planning with budgeting tools that keep you ahead of your finances at all times. The goal is to keep in touch with your finances in terms of:
- Your current needs with various projects.
- Future transactions that may arise.
- Contingencies.
- Plans for expansions.
Financial planning and budgeting tools factor in all your financial needs to give you an accurate idea about your expenses. Armed with a better foresight about where your business is headed in terms of money needs, you can make better decisions.
You will have a sound grasp of your financial availability and will allocate the funds more appropriately to different departments. This creates a better flow of resources for your projects and helps in achieving a smooth flow of operations.
2. Ambitious travel management
Many businesses try to curb travel expenses to save up. In reality, traveling for business allows you to tap into new opportunities and expand your business on a global scale. Instead of curbing travel altogether, the better option would be to manage it to allow yourself opportunities.
This guide provides the basics of travel management with actionable strategies and great tools. It’s important to understand that travel management does not mean spending more, it simply means managing your resources better to incorporate travel.
Travel management directly impacts corporate efficiency as all the tasks will be performed with the possibility of travel in mind. You’d be looking for business deals across the globe instead of in your area because you know you can make it happen. This greatly increases the options you have.
Here are a few tips to manage travel better for improved efficiency:
- Establish a travel policy to streamline business travel.
- Use a travel management tool to track all trips.
- Encourage your employees to use the travel management solutions to familiarize themselves.
- Incorporate AI technology to anticipate traveler needs more accurately.
- Keep an eye on travel trends to tap into suitable opportunities.
3. Streamlined processes
51% of the workforce reports performing repetitive tasks for at least two hours of repetitive tasks every workday. This is because work processes are not optimized to reduce repetitive work. This in turn hampers their enthusiasm for the creative work they do get to do.
It’s extremely important to streamline every work process performed in your firm. It:
- Reduces the steps that are performed.
- Eliminates redundant steps.
- Saves time, effort, and resources allocated to it.
- Makes employees enthusiastic about engaging with it.
To streamline any process, follow these steps:
- Consider the end goal you wish to achieve with it. For example, the end goal of recording attendance is to know how many employees are present on a workday.
- Deduce the manual input needed for the task. To record attendance, you could have employees put in their attendance themselves, and the HR record it.
- Decide the most optimized path to accomplish the task. Don’t shy away from experimenting with different pathways to arrive at the most optimal one. The goal should be to have minimal human input for menial tasks and give them maximum room or management related to creative tasks.
- Allocate the tools and resources to create the optimized pathway for the process.
- Once the process is streamlined, make sure to let the employees know about it through announcements, handbooks, and guides. Archive the process in an accessible place so everyone can return to it in case of any doubts.
Streamlining of processes is a major contributor to achieving operational efficiency across the organization. When employees know what they need to do and repetitive tasks are reduced to a minimum, they’re able to do more with every task.
It increases their productivity as well as the enthusiasm they engage with the task. They’d be more willing to do something when they know it is the most optimized path. It boosts their morale and brings positivity to the workspace.
4. Clear communication channels
While many companies focus on enhancing the quality of the communication their employees have with each other, it’s equally important to establish clear communication lines across your entire organization framework.
When employees have doubts about who to report to and who to consult about work with, it results in delays, misunderstandings, and overall inefficiency in workflow. This has only increased with the rise of remote working which makes it more challenging to cultivate smooth communication.
There are two aspects to setting clear communication channels:
- Setting up the hierarchy of who reports to whom as well as the internal distinction of different teams and departments.
- Providing your employees with tools to communicate with ease.
These together contribute to setting clear communication channels where employees know to report to and consult at all times and are armed with tools to do so with ease. Use communication tools that allow for different forms of communication in one place such as:
- Audio
- Video
- Text
- Personal messaging
- Group messaging
- Sharing documents with ease
This keeps all the related information in one place and makes it easy for employees to follow communication channels. It helps them complete tasks faster and with better efficiency, boosting productivity and bringing positive energy to your work culture.
5. Enthusiastic workers
It’s no secret that a determined and driven workforce is one of the most prominent ingredients to maximizing operational efficiency. When workers are passionate about the work they do, the end result is automatically one that is superior in quality.
Achieving such an enthusiastic workforce is where the question lies. There are primarily two ways to do this:
- Hiring enthusiastic candidates from the get-go.
- Engaging the workforce you have to perform with more passion.
The ideal option would be a combination of both. Pay attention in your hiring process to pick candidates who are driven about their work. See if they’d fit well into your work culture.
Keep your existing workforce engaged with the work they do by assessing their participation and rewarding extraordinary work. Let them know you value their association with you and give them opportunities to unwind and relax as well.
This lightens their mood and boosts their morale. They’d give their best shot at every task which will in turn boost productivity and efficiency.
Propper planning and inspired execution are the keys to maximizing operation efficiency
Companies often struggle with achieving their maximum potential when they’re being weighed down with operational inefficiencies.
An effective solution is to plan ahead of time. This allows you to be financially stable and tap opportunities. Include travel in your business to expand your operations on a global scale. Streamline processes to minimize the repetition of tasks.
Set communication channels to provide clarity of operations of your team. And focus on cultivating a driven team. These factors combine to achieve sublime efficiency with the work you do.
Let us know in the comments what you think are the key ingredients to maximize operational efficiency.
⸻ Author Bio ⸻
Atreyee Chowdhury is a freelance content writer with more than 10+ years of professional experience. She’s passionate about helping SMBs and enterprises achieve their content marketing goals with her carefully crafted and compelling content. She loves to read, travel, and experiment with different cuisines in her free time. You can follow her on LinkedIn.
