A small business can only be as successful as it is organized, especially during times of crisis. Whether or not you’re dealing with a pandemic or you’re simply trying to stay afloat in a competitive industry, you can’t expect to achieve better results without organizing, centralizing, and automating various internal processes. Keep in mind that this is not just about your own productivity and efficiency, it’s about the productivity of your entire, diverse employee collective.
Your employees need to have the right digital tools, policies, and processes in place in order to do a better job, minimize errors and prevent data leaks, and achieve your long-term goals. With all of that in mind, today we are going to take a closer look at the best organizational strategies you can implement in your small business.
Here’s what you need to do.
It all starts with an organized office space
Whether you and your employees are all working under the same roof or you’re currently managing a decentralized workforce, it’s important to keep the office organized. Office organization starts with a clear plan and an effective layout that emphasizes collaboration, easy movement, comfort, and communication between employees. But in order for any of that to work, you have to keep the office space free of clutter.
Make sure to declutter on a regular basis in order to keep the office life running smoothly. If your employees are working remotely, prompt them to declutter their workspace as well as their work devices regularly to promote productivity and mental clarity at work.
Next, if everyone is working in the same office space, be sure to assign an office head. This person is tasked with ensuring that everything around the workspace is optimized for maximum productivity and efficiency.
An office manager will organize everything from routine systems and IT maintenance to security checkups, all the way to making sure that the space is stocked with all the essentials.
Automate as much as you can
We live in the age of business automation, but it’s important to note that automation is not reserved only for the big corporations with deep pockets. In fact, nowadays you can find a piece of automation software for almost any department, task, and process in your company – many of which won’t make you break the bank. As a small business owner, you should look to automate as many menial tasks in your company as possible in order to elevate productivity, efficiency, and zeal in the workplace.
Fortunately, there are many ways you can introduce automation in your business. From those smart gadgets that keep your portable office running, all the way to proprietary software everyone can use to collaborate and communicate more effectively.
At the very least, make sure to introduce workflow and project management software that will centralize all work and communication, in order for productivity and output to soar.
Boost sales and marketing with better contact management
Contact management is one of the most important processes that all small businesses should take seriously. Your sales, marketing, and support teams all depend on good contact management and organization in order to manage customer relationships, boost sales and qualified leads, and provide the best possible experience to every customer. In order to do that, you need to be able to manage your Google contacts in a centralized location.
Using a robust Gmail CRM to share and edit contacts across teams and departments, and collaborate more effectively on different projects is one of the best ways to make good use of your contacts in the digital space. This is what popular tools such as Shared Contacts for Gmail achieve with their built-in features that allow you to control access to contacts, assign labels to each, edit contact information, and share your contacts with your team.
Ultimately, smart contact management will allow your sales, marketing, and support teams to do a better job.
Have a policy for all internal processes
Detailed policies help keep a small business running like a well-oiled machine. They also provide some much-needed legal protection and help protect your brand as well as your employees. If you want to protect your assets as a small business owner, you need to create robust policies that will organize all your internal processes and set the right rules in place.
These policies should include your standard operating procedures that will also act as training manuals for new hires. This will allow newcomers to become productive team members quickly, and your veteran employees to achieve better results.
Organize everything in the cloud
In the end, consider migrating your operation to the cloud in order to elevate productivity, cut IT expenses, and bring new services and products to your customers. There are many benefits to choosing a managed cloud service when you’re running an eCommerce business, for example, but cloud technology is beneficial to any small business in any industry.
Instead of investing in an in-house IT infrastructure that’s difficult to scale to your evolving needs, you can migrate your processes to the cloud and get a ready-to-go infrastructure. You and your employees can use the cloud’s features and solutions to collaborate in real-time, drive innovation forward, and align your services to your customers’ needs.
Over to you
Organizing your small business is one of the best things you can do to future-proof your brand and take your company to new heights of success. Be sure to invest in these strategies to elevate productivity, efficiency, and zeal across teams and departments.
