When you first launch a startup, you may begin as a one person entity. Most of your business can be conducted from the comfort of your own home, in your pajamas and sipping your home brewed cup of coffee. However, as you begin to settle into your industry and make a name for yourself, you may find that you need to increase productivity as orders for your services or products come flooding in. This is why you need to ensure that your business plan details the ways you are going to expand, boost productivity and help your business thrive. Take a look at these five simple ways that you can enhance productivity.
Hire People To Help
Becoming an employer rather than an employee is daunting. Hiring the right people to help grow your business can be the most difficult decision you face. Do you go for the Ivy League college graduate or do you hire the person who you seemed to gel with at interview? Always opt for the latter. As a new company, you need people who you get along with and who will work well in a cohesive team. Getting along, being on the same wavelength and sharing a business ethos is half of the battle. If you need to carry out criminal records checks or complete drugs screenings of candidates, check out the Checkr website that gives you the industry specific tools to help you carry this out.
Invest In Your Staff
As a startup, it can be hard to attract the best candidates to apply for positions. You may need an exceptional accountant or investment manager to help you with your cash flow. While it’s ideal to hire someone with experience of new businesses, you may find yourself having to hire a college graduate. Don't think this means lower productivity levels. Being young and learning the latest methodologies and best working practices, graduates fresh out of college can be the perfect people to add to your team.
At the same time, you need to show these graduates what you can offer them. As an employee, they should enjoy continuing professional development. By investing in your team, you are showing that you care about their careers. In turn, they will feel valued and will be more likely to maximize their efforts in meeting or exceeding targets. As a startup it is this extra push in productivity that will help your business survive the tricky first eighteen months of trading.
Enhance Your Workplace
If you already have a cohesive staff team who are working well together, but all of a sudden productivity has dropped, you will need to take a look at the working environment that you provide. You need to facilitate a dynamic and thriving atmosphere that will help inspire and engage your staff team. Beige flooring, cracked paint, mold by the window seals and dodgy scuffs on the walls simply won’t cut it. A sea of brown may have worked in the 1990s, but fast forward to the twenty first century, and people want to work somewhere that makes them feel positive.
Whip out the white paint and get some local art work on the walls. Ensure that you get some greenery into the office and swap those 1980s individual booths with desktops inside them for more open plan office working. Collaborative pods are perfect for business meetings and those water cooler moments can be had with a dynamic and happy staff team. Productivity levels are heavily linked to morale. Keep the morale high and the productivity levels will be too.
Communicate with your team every week by sending out an update email on a Friday. This shows that you value their input and want to keep them in the loop with developments. This is a simple way to enhance the productivity of your team.
Retrain
If you want to keep your business as a one person venture for a little longer, you may need to up your skills in certain areas. No entrepreneur is a Jack of all trades from the get go. You may have begun your startup as a finance specialist, a marketing executive or a social media manager. Going freelance means you need to wear many more hats to ensure the smooth running of your business. Before you resign from your full time position, ensure that you do some courses to enhance your skill set. Enroll on a bookkeeping course to prepare for payroll duties, consider checking out SEO beginners classes for your website development and always keep an eye out for anything that will focus on soft skills like leadership and presentation. By becoming a more well rounded professional, you will maximize the chances of your startup being a success.
Hardware
If you are a business reliant on decent IT and hardware, then you need to make sure that your gear is up to scratch. There’s nothing worse than your employees being unable to complete tasks and duties because the printer is forever running out of ink, the photocopier is always broken or the WiFi goes down several times a day. Productivity will inevitably drop. While some technological bugs are out of your control, you can mitigate them more effectively if you ensure that you have reliable pieces of kit. Those ten year old tower computers just won’t do. Invest in a decent server, ensure that laptops are modern and fast, and make sure that you utilize industry specific software to make tasks easier to complete. The best industry specific software will be used by your rivals and you need to keep up so spend some of your hard earned cash flow on this.
Being an entrepreneur is difficult especially in the modern climate. More people than ever are choosing to take the plunge and become masters of their own professional destiny. If you are keen to launch your own business and take your first tentative steps into the world of entrepreneurship, ensure that you follow this guide to boost your productivity.
