Companies don’t thrive if they’re not working as efficiently as possible.
Taking advantage of time-saving tips for work is how firms reduce waste and fuel growth. If your team’s processes are rife with inefficiencies, employees end up spending way too much time on repetitive tasks, stealing the time they need for strategic work that moves the needle in your firm.
In our upcoming report, more than 80% of professional services dealmakers said they spent 11-plus hours on non-strategic tasks every week. Consider what your firm could accomplish if each employee had 11-plus hours to spend on achieving strategic goals.
Inefficiencies have other drawbacks as well.
When employees are forced to follow inefficient processes or have no processes in place to follow, they can become frustrated and suffer from burnout. According to McKinsey & Company, 28% of employees report high rates of burnout and distress symptoms despite companies making well-being and mental health a priority.
That means even if you promote wellness initiatives, like offering stress-relieving breaks and encouraging PTO, your inefficient business practices could still be causing burnout. When businesses refuse to incorporate efficiency via time-saving tips and automation, employee experience suffers. And having a positive employee experience is essential.
Employee experience matters because it:
Improving employee experience begins with incorporating more efficient business practices. Being more efficient will also benefit your firm as a whole.
When a firm enacts common efficiency measures and takes advantage of techniques to improve productivity, waste is reduced which leads to higher profits, happier and more engaged staff and satisfied clients.
Incorporate these time-saving tips for work and technology ideas to help automate your most time-consuming processes and improve efficiency.
Your workforce is your greatest resource, and inefficiencies will occur if teams can’t work together easily.
Cross-team collaboration is one of the best strategies for firms to boost growth and innovation, and intentionally generating synergy between teams is the only way to make this possible. According to Indeed, synergy in the workforce is when two or more individuals or organizations combine their efforts to enhance their achievements, typically improving their finances or expanding their reach.
Technology is one of the best ways to increase synergy and efficiency between teams and individuals. Putting the right tools in your stack makes it easy for teams to keep tabs on current projects, automates hand-offs and boosts visibility outcomes and reporting. When resources are shared, making data and technology accessible to everyone who needs it, more work can get done faster, helping teams produce at a higher level.
When synergy isn’t achieved, data and communication remain in silos. When data is siloed, and only accessible by one department, the results can be a severe lack of transparency, efficiency and trust within the organization as a whole, according to HubSpot.
Choosing technology that makes your data accessible is a great time-saving tip as it reduces silos and gets everyone on the same page.
Automation is one of the biggest time-saving tips for work as it allows firms to save both time and money. Why? Repetitive tasks are one of the biggest robbers of employee time and energy.
McKinsey research suggests that as many as 45% of the activities employees perform can be automated by adapting technology, saving about $2 trillion in annual wages.
Consider how much repetitive work your marketing department alone must complete. For every potential client, custom pitch materials, proposals and tombstones need to be put together.
Without automation, this work becomes repetitive and slow. Employees are forced to sort through multiple databases and data points to find the necessary information, slowing down their processes.
Data-driven marketing automation software for professional services makes time-consuming, repetitive tasks fast, efficient and accurate.
Having data in one centralized location also allows employees to complete tasks quickly, freeing up time to focus on more strategic items. In fact, 88% of marketers said that reducing time spent on preparing reports and analyses gives them more time to prepare a strategy.
Automation is valuable in more industries than just factories and areas that rely on low-wage workers. McKinsey found that automation has a significant place in the highest-paid occupations like financial managers and senior executives.
Automating repetitive tasks also means creating repeatable processes and templates for common tasks.
For example, creating custom pitch materials, proposals and tombstones from scratch for each client can waste ample employee time. 45% of organizations report it takes a week to prepare a business contract. Access to accurate data is one thing, but being able to plug it into a template makes the entire process even more efficient.
But what’s more, it has been found that 20% of documents created by employees contain errors. Creating and using templates reduces that risk and helps firms maintain a cohesive company image and brand.
Implementing technology that quickly utilizes templates, like those used in PowerPoint, is a great way to get started. When software solutions offer built-in templates, firms don’t have to waste time and energy developing their own. The benefit of this time-saving tip for work is immediately felt by teams when implemented, due to the scalability.
Another time-saving tip for work is to batch your work to promote efficiency.
According to Indeed, task batching involves combining similar tasks and completing them simultaneously rather than spreading them throughout the day. Task batching can increase focus, reduce stress and improve productivity.
Task batching starts by creating and prioritizing a to-do list. Once this is accomplished, separate larger projects into smaller tasks to make the workload more manageable, like grouping all your email tasks together to complete them at once.
Categorize your tasks according to function and color code tasks by priority. Once all your tasks are sorted and categorized, you can use them to organize your schedule. An organized schedule allows employees to increase productivity while staying on track, without missing any high-priority assignments.
Implementing these time-saving tips for work is a great way to start becoming more efficient. But the process is easier when you have a trusted partner that can provide many of these solutions for you.
Pitchly’s data-driven technology helps business professionals get more work done, faster and easier. Pitchly’s solutions can automate repetitive work and uses templates for the processes that your team does every day. And Pitchly’s centralized database ensures that every piece of data you need is in reach, fueling an efficient end-to-end workflow.
Browse our Data-Driven Content capabilities and start your journey to efficiency today.