Are you interested in learning more about action areas and ways you can improve your business’s productivity during slower seasons? As an employer, increasing how effective and efficient your business operates can be very beneficial. Read the article below for tips!
Action Areas and Ways to Improve Business Productivity During the Slower Season
Table of contents
Introduction
Why Increase Business Productivity?
Identify and Set Goals
Go Digital
Payments
Revisit Your Marketing Strategy
Closing
Introduction
No matter what time of the year or season, every team or company goes through slow periods during the year. As an employer, increasing productivity in the workplace can be very beneficial for your business. However, it’s not always the easiest thing to do.
Business productivity refers to how effectively and efficiently your business operates. This also includes employee productivity, which means how well your employees achieve goals and tasks set out for them. To improve business productivity, your employees must also be productive.
Depending on your industry or what type of company you are, productivity may look different from company to company. Increasing productivity may mean to increase conversions, creating more products, or meeting a sales quota.
Why Increase Business Productivity?
First off, business productivity is essential for your bottom line. Your business can’t produce a profit if more money is going out than coming in. Essentially, productivity can hinder your business from moving forward. Healthy growth comes from good productivity rates, which means that you must make the most out of your available resources — office employees, technicians, digital software, trucks, inventory, storage space, experience, skills, etc.
So how can a business increase its productivity during the slow seasons? In this article, we’ll discuss the various ways that you can improve business productivity during the slower seasons with proven strategies and tips.
Identify and Set Goals
This is an obvious first step, but it’s valuable when pursuing productivity in your business. You’ll need a sturdy framework to begin with, and you’ll need a specific plan as well.
Consider the SMART goal setting system. This system states that business goals must be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-based to be successful. Following the SMART framework will provide a realistic framework of goals to achieve and how you’ll go about achieving them. In addition, your goals should involve a challenge. They should be able to test your current capacities to drive productivity levels.
When goals have been set and defined, be sure to explain them to your technicians and others in the company. Your employees need to understand what is required of them to reach the goals and the necessary productivity levels to help achieve them.
Go Digital
In the field service industry, the biggest hindrance to productivity is paper-based processes. We’re well within an almost entirely digital world, and paper-based processes will hurt your company’s growth. We’re in an era where customers sign contracts on devices, receive updates on their smartphones and receive receipts through their email; therefore, paper documents and inefficient business practices can slow your company down.
This is where a field service management tool comes in. Instead of relying on notebooks to keep track of inventory and scheduling, a field service management software will provide proper scheduling, quicker invoicing, increased functionality and flexibility, and reduced costs.
In addition, a good field service management tool will track technicians and their skills, truck locations, and any tools or equipment they use. Then, it can use this information to assign the appropriate technician to the right job. Field service management software can help eliminate paper processes, as well as manage the entire workflow of your company.
Payments
Payments can cause a lot of friction for any business. You might have to wait for invoices to come in, or you might have to chase down debts. Juggling payments that don’t come in on time can negatively affect your productivity levels.
Thanks to mobile payment providers, small businesses can accept card payments from anywhere. This technology works by using your smartphone as the base. Technicians and office staff can enter the cardholder’s details into the app to process the card. If the cardholder has sufficient funds, their card issuer will release the money, just like a regular payment terminal.
Customers today can purchase anything they want online at any time; therefore, the same concept should apply to your business. Your business shouldn’t have to jump through hoops to secure a payment; instead, the process should be seamless and hassle-free.
Revisit Your Marketing Strategy
During the slower seasons, your company has a lot more time to revisit areas that may need improvement. You may find that your marketing could be better in certain areas and that there are new approaches that you can take.
Firstly, it’s essential that you know the importance of marketing for your business. It isn’t something that should be optional; every business, no matter the industry, needs marketing to be successful. In a general sense, what are the benefits of marketing for your business?
- Marketing gets the word out about your business.
- It allows your company to build a consistent client base.
- It informs potential customers about the services you offer.
- It boosts sales and revenue.
When examining your marketing efforts, it’s important to dive deep into different marketing metrics to gain an understanding of what areas need improvement. Ask specific questions such as:
- How is our engagement on social media? – Engagement refers to how well your customers are interacting with your social media. This shows that your customers are satisfied with your social media content.
- How has traffic grown on our website? – Traffic refers to the visitors to your site. A good amount of traffic provides opportunities to sell your product or service to customers.
- Has our conversion rate improved? – Conversion rate is the percentage of visitors to your website that complete a desired goal (buying a service or buying a product). This directly correlates to revenue for your company.
- Are there any marketing metrics that we can learn from?
These questions can help reveal what areas of your marketing strategy need to be revisited and help define new marketing strategies for the future.
Closing
Increasing productivity during the slower seasons can be tough, and it can be hard to bring momentum back to your business. However, the slower seasons allow you to work on your business areas that need more attention and provide the means to plan for the future.
When those slower seasons come, you’ll be prepared with these tips, and you’ll be able to make the best of your current resources, implement new ideas and strategies, and find new ways to bring productivity levels back to normal or better than before.
Source: FieldEdge
