Are you wasting time?
Running a successful business is a team game.
You can have the most qualified people, but this is meaningless if don’t work together. To ensure that your company is as efficient as possible, you must have functioning communication channels open with your key stakeholder groups, inside and outside of the organisation.
This might sound like common sense, but countless hours of productive work time are lost where people are either overloaded with information, or have insufficient detail to produce their best work. The actions I am advocating in this article offer some simple solutions to this challenge. They may take time to implement, but once you have done this, you will reap the rewards of more purposeful communication.
A limiting mindset – Taking each day as it comes
If your diary is unremittingly full, you must evaluate your time management.
Reactive leaders are captivated by short-term victories. This means they are too busy fire-fighting and spreading their efforts too thinly to extract the most value from their days. It’s admirable to throw yourself into tasks and be the ‘solutions guy,’ but knowing where your efforts are most needed is an important lesson to learn.
You have to find the right balance between supporting your colleagues and more independent strategic work. This relies on getting the correct mix, within your weekly schedule, of non-negotiable structure and flexibility to switch focus when required.
Determine what rough percentage of your time needs to be dedicated to the different aspects of your business. Try to divide your diary with regard to this. To make this adjustment, you may need to appoint trusted deputies to attend meetings, or oversee some activities. This should have the twin benefits of increasing your productivity, whilst training others to adopt further responsibility.
A missing element – Sharing information
Interacting with everyone understandably becomes more challenging as a business grows. Therefore, ensuring each person has the information they need at the correct time is a common inhibitor for efficiency.
Communicating between departments, training staff and onboarding new team members all rely on transferring information. Assess your current methods of communication: are they working to best affect? Find what’s right for your company culture, whether this is regular video calls, a digital notice board, or dedicated group chats.
A central store of information can be a game-changer, so that everyone can obtain the details they need quickly and in a format best suited the task at hand. This could be cloud system with password restriction for particular access levels. Having this asset will minimise time lost waiting for the relevant guidance, whilst reducing the pressure on those constantly having to supply it.
A different perspective – It’s how you say it…
Beyond having ready information, it’s vital that what you have is fit for purpose.
In reports and meetings, only communicate what you need to know. Be as concise as possible. Pages and pages of unnecessary text will only slow you down and meetings that drag on four hours will only keep you from the places you really need to be. It’s up to you to set the structure of these interactions, so people know how to prepare accordingly.
For reports: Try to keep them as brief as possible; one side of A4 paper if this is achievable. Specify what you want to find out and create a standard template for your colleagues to populate.
For meetings: Focus on these three questions…
1. What have they achieved?
2. What challenges are they facing?
3. How can I support you in this activity?
As long as your employees understand, from the offset, the key aim, how this will be assessed (key performance indicators) and how long they have to work on this initiative, you are moving in the right direction. Effective communication should be demonstrated from the top, as businesses with ‘scatty’ leaders tend to follow their example and exhibit more wide-spread disorganisation.
Instilling efficiency might seem like an insurmountable task, particularly if you run a big company. However, the investment in energy it will take will undoubtedly pay-off long-term, as you notice an acceleration in the tasks you complete. Once you have established a set of rules for communication, this will make the merging of different approaches, that’s so fundamental to a business, so much more cohesive.
Your time, and their time, is precious; don’t waste it.