Dianne Pajo
For your business to be successful, you must be organized, have a good understanding and foundation for your future, and know how to be productive. Organization and planning for the future are somewhat simple, but productivity can be elusive for many businesses. It’s partly because many businesses fail to avoid some productivity mistakes that can easily set them behind schedule. Recognizing these mistakes and avoiding them will do a lot to help your business succeed in whatever industry you’re a part of.
Not Trusting Employees
A huge mistake that many businesses make is they don’t trust their employees. For someone to submit a task or make a call, they need to consult multiple levels of the business hierarchy before doing anything. If you want to be productive, you need to trust your employees to:
- Do the right job
- Work quickly and efficiently
- Know what’s best for them and the team
Micro-managing is a great way to limit employee productivity and push employees to leave entirely. A high turnover rate is another thing that hurts your business’s productivity and your team’s morale. It can get in the way of future success.
Forgetting Preventative Maintenance
One significant productivity mistake many businesses in many industries make is failing to perform preventative maintenance. It’s easy to overlook because you can say to yourself, “Why would I spend money here when I can just spend money to replace something if it breaks?” However, this strategy hurts productivity and your pockets as well. Take something like a packaging machine, for example.
To prolong the life of your packaging machine, you must perform preventative maintenance. It helps you recognize issues earlier, and you can address them before they turn into something worse. You’ll spend some resources in the short term, such as time and money, but your machines will work much better for longer. Failing to do the proper maintenance can cause your machines to malfunction, work inefficiently, or break on you, leaving you waiting for replacements.
Wasting Time
It’s easy to understand that wasting time is a productivity mistake, but how exactly are businesses wasting time? Some of the biggest time wasters that companies, both big and small, seem to have over and over are pointless meetings and emails. A business should run like a well-oiled machine, so stopping that machine with meetings and emails that go over the same things repeatedly is not the best way to stay productive.
A great solution is having a company or team-wide information sheet that everyone can look at. With something like this, you can put down any important information that people need to know, and if someone has a question, they can ask whoever put that information into the sheet. People can look at this on their own instead of leaving in the middle of being productive, only to see that it’s someone’s birthday at the end of the week.
Be sure to avoid these productivity mistakes so that your business can grow and succeed. It’s easy for a small mistake or overlooked issue to spiral out of control and keep your business running behind projections, but it’s similarly easy to avoid those mistakes. Yes, it takes some time and effort, but you’re setting your business up for success when you’re sure you’re avoiding these productivity mistakes.
