https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/452313815
Employee efficiency has the potential to make or break a business’ ability to serve its customers and grow the company’s bottom line. So why do so many small business owners not take a closer look at what they can be doing to improve employee efficiency?
Sure, rules about attendance and appropriate social media/cell phone usage while working are important. But they focus on the employee’s behavior. We have several suggestions that small business owners in just about any industry can use to improve their employee efficiency, thus improving their customer service and overall bottom line.
Outsource errands to a courier service
We’ve written before about the benefits of outsourcing company errands to a professional courier service such as On Time Logistics. Since that time, we’ve expanded our footprint to include our main offices in Springdale, and new satellite offices in Tulsa and Little Rock. This means we have a full team of couriers available to run daily errands for your business in those cities and surrounding areas.
Many small businesses ask their employees to run errands either throughout the day or as they come back from their lunch hour. This interrupts the employee from performing their primary function and decreases efficiency in a variety of ways. Couriers offer time efficiency, cost efficiency and talent efficiency.
Examine your procedures
A simple operational audit of your procedures and processes could point out ways your employees could service customers quicker and more effectively. To be clear, this is an audit to see how the procedures work when properly followed not a test to see if they are being followed. (However, if you’re seeing that the same steps are not being followed by several different people, it might be that the procedures are not effective enough or being communicated well enough).
Improving your procedures can save the customer time (which they will like), can help reduce mistakes, and creates more time for a larger number of customers to be served.
Update your technology
Updating technology might have a short-term price tag, but long-term positive results. Do you have a slow cash register or computer that makes the employee take extra time or even more prone to mistakes? Or how is your inventory control system? Using a digital inventory control system (and even outsourcing your warehousing and fulfillment needs to a company like On Time Logistics) will reduce mistakes and improve overall efficiency.
What other ways are you going to improve efficiency in 2015? Share in the comments! And if you’re ready to outsource your courier needs, give us at On Time Logistics a call today.