As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to put a financial strain on many businesses, the mantra “work smarter, not harder” has probably never looked more appealing. At a time when your company has probably never had less money, it needs to make the best of what it does still have.
Fortunately, doing exactly that can just be a matter of readjusting and honing various practices your business could already have been long following. Once you’ve made those changes, they could hold your business in good stead for well beyond the pandemic itself.
Cut out the deadwood:
You might have inherited “deadwood employees” – employees who serve too little purpose for the investment put in them – from a previous owner of the company. Alternatively, you might have inadvertently added below-par workers to your team during periods of high turnover and expansion.
Now that your corporate budget is tighter, though, you should weed out those employees who are too weak and ineffective compared to your star performers who could too often cover for them.
Instill loyalty in your best employees:
In a crisis situation, you don’t want to lose your best workers, as doing so would make it harder for your company to rebuild once the crisis itself has subsided.
When something simply has to give, you should try to furlough, rather than fire, any of these workers whose positions are threatened. As a Harvard Business Review article says, “you want to maintain your ability to rehire your best workers when the world is open for business again.”
Make sure your workers receive proper training:
Your company’s workers are its strongest assets – and they can be even stronger when you train them to ensure that your workforce can do more without you having to add to its membership.
As a Business 2 Community article warns: “The days of ‘ensuring’ great service because you have high staffing levels are long gone. Today, you need higher productivity from a smaller staff.” Proper training makes that possible – and this training, needless to say, should be an ongoing thing.
Look for new ways to avoid wasting time:
You probably think your ethical business operations are pretty time-efficient anyway – but, upon looking more closely at them, you could uncover further opportunities to save time.
AllBusiness.com puts it succinctly: “Once you start wasting time, wasting money or wasting energy, that particular project or task needs to be dropped, or outsourced to someone else.” You want to dedicate your time strictly to those clients or projects that will be of most use to your company.
See where you can replace multiple pieces of equipment with one:
You could be surprised by how many pieces of tech can essentially do double duty – or even triple or quadruple duty. For example, if you currently have separate cutting and creasing machines taking up space in the office, you could replace those machines with one of these slitters cutters creasers.
This simple move would enable you to get four print finishing processes – cutting, slitting, creasing, and perforating – from just one machine.
Read Also:
