Gold, platinum, silver, diamonds, all of it falls drastically short when compared to the commodity of time. Time cannot be transferred. It can be bought or sold. It can be mined. It cannot be manufactured. Time simply has to be used efficiently, and that means it is less about the hours you put in and more about how much you get out of every hour, every minute. It is about being smart. That is what it is all about, and the better we can get at this the better balance we will achieve.
The question is how to we become smarter and more productive with our time?
Well, we have spoken to a range of successful business owners and entrepreneurs and compiled a list of top tips to help you and your employees squeeze the most out of each passing second.
Start Outsourcing
Outsourcing has become a huge trend in all areas of business for numerous reasons. The first is that it allows specialists to take over tasks that your full-time employees may not be equipped to oversee, or may not have the time to oversee. It could be that you have a small IT team that helps ensure the server is up and running and that any computer crashes are dealt with in a swift manner. However, they may not be up to the completing some of the more arduous tasks, say managing your cloud services, which is a task you could outsource to an IT support company. The other reason outsourcing has become so beneficial is that it allows a company to upscale and downsize as and when it needs to. By doing this it can maximize its productivity when the going is good and reduce costs when the market becomes unpredictable or slow.
Give Your Meetings A Structure
Every single entrepreneur we spoke to stressed the importance of streamlining internal meetings, and the most effective way of doing this is to go into meetings with a set agenda, and a time limit for each top. Another great tip is to list the different agenda topics in priority order so that you get the important subjects out of the way first. This will stop a thirty-minute meeting from becoming a two and a half hour ordeal, especially if there are 8 people in the meeting, which will equate to 20 resource hours. The reason an agenda will help is simple. It will allow everyone to see what needs to be discussed without straying too far off topic.
Training
One of the best investments any company can make is in the training and upskilling of its current employees. However, training staff can use up a lot of resources, a lot of money, it can take a lot of planning, organizing and executing. That is where digital learning can prove to be an incredible alternative, and allow you to get the most out of your time. Simply decide what topic you require your training to be on, be it Code of Conduct, customer services, security, or whatever, and put this out to tender. This will see you get the best deals from the best companies. You can then determine which offer best suits your vision, and have the training delivered straight to you, allowing your employees to access the training from their desks or even their mobile phones. What’s more, you will be able to see an audit trail of who has completed the training and to what standard.
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