In today’s cutthroat commercial world, optimizing key areas of your business for maximum efficiency is vital to sustainable success and evolution.
As the lifeblood of your business (alongside your customers), the engagement and wellbeing of your employees should sit at the top of your priority list.
In addition to building a healthy, collaborative culture, by streamlining your workforce management processes, you will catalyze your success, significantly, pushing yourself ahead of your competitors in the process.
To help you optimize your workforce management processes to increase engagement and productivity, here are practical three steps you should take.
1. Realign your internal structure
86% of business executives believe that poor communication and a lack of collaboration are responsible for most of their organization’s failures.
Poor, or indeed antiquated, organizational structures create silos that stunt cross-departmental communication while hindering innovation. That said, the first logical step in optimizing your workforce for maximum success should be to realign your internal framework.
When it comes to organizational structure, one size certainly doesn’t fit all—and to make valuable strategic decisions, it’s important to consider your company culture in addition to your core business mission in everything you do.
To help steer your efforts, here are some tips for your consideration:
- Identify your existing strengths and weaknesses to understand where you will need to make tweaks or adjustments.
- Make strategic tweaks that focus less on hierarchy and more in the sharing of ideas and opinions.
- Consider an open plan working space as well as remote working opportunities, where appropriate.
- Encourage your senior staff to hold regular cross-departmental workshops or meetings by highlighting where their roles interlink or overlap and giving them the space or tools to do so.
2. Enhance communication & collaboration
Once you’ve restructured your internal framework and office design to break down silos and maximize cross-departmental efficiency, the next phase of the operation is to further enhance collaboration and communication.
In the digital age, the tools and technology exist to ensure fluid communication and collaboration across touchpoints.
As well as holding frequent cross-departmental meetings, brainstorming sessions, social activities, and workshops, you should consider leveraging digital project management tools to make your internal affairs all the more cohesive. Tools in including:
- Google Docs: A seamless word processer with collaborative functions including editorial suggestions and in-document annotations.
- Trello: An intuitive multi-purpose project management tool for real-time collaboration in addition to logical task management features and functionality.
- Monday: A conversational tool that offers the ability to assign tasks, leave comments and add ‘at a glance’ details to task or project briefs.
- MindMup: An effective visual brainstorming and mind-mapping tool for conjuring collaborative ideas based on particular tasks, challenges or campaigns.
By harnessing the power of technology and creating initiatives to make cross-departmental collaboration commonplace, you will be well on your way to workplace management success.
3. Streamline time management
On average, managers across industries waste around three hours per day on unnecessary roadblocks or interruptions.
With your new structure and collaborative initiatives in place, the final piece of the workplace management optimization puzzle comes in the form of streamlining your time management processes.
Naturally, your efforts thus far should have enhanced internal efficiency, but to optimize your workforce strategy to its full potential, you need to drill down into working hours, shift logistics, and attendance verification.
Deputy’s employee time clock app offers an intuitive, automated solution to employee time management. Not only does the platform help in the time management optimization process, but it also automatically integrates with payroll and POS, in addition to other integral platforms.
When it comes to the ongoing optimization of your workforce, innovative, tech-driven time management solution is the way forward. An investment worth making.
“If you want something to happen, you have to make people able and you have to make them want to.”—Dr Steve Kerr, former CEO of Goldman Sachs
These three definitive steps to workforce management optimization will help drive engagement, productivity, and innovation throughout the organization. Take action now and you will push yourself ahead of the pack sooner than you think.
For more business-boosting insights, read our guide to using your competitor’s backlink profile to your advantage.
John Pearson is a serial entrepreneur and writer who is passionate about helping small businesses launch and grow. His work has been featured in Huffington Post, Entrepreneur, and Forbes.
