Working long, hard hours is the key to success. Right?

Wrong.

If you’re like many business managers, you’ve probably discovered that working 16-hour days doesn’t bring the rewards you had hoped for.

It’s not about working harder. It’s about working smarter. It may sound trite, but it’s true.

Automation Isn’t Just for Laborers

It’s easy to visualize smart, efficient work practices when manual labor is involved. You can literally see it working.

If, for example, a company wins a contract to dig a trench, management has a couple of options. They can send out a bunch of laborers with shovels and simply tell them to start digging wherever they think the trench should go.

Or they can develop a process. This includes checking with local utilities to make sure the workers don’t sever pipes and cables, plotting a course for the trench, removing vegetation, and then digging the trench in the least labor intensive way--using a bulldozer.

Management spends time up front to develop the process. They also invest in equipment. They’re working smarter and the trench is hollowed out faster, better and less expensively.

Although it’s harder to see how efficient processes and systems affect administrative areas like human resources, purchasing, information technology, sales, marketing and finance, you can see them in black and white when you look at how they fatten up the bottom line.

Therefore, you want to empower your office workers to be as productive production line workers. You don’t want to fall victim to the number one killer of small and mid-sized businesses--the time and energy people spend on non-value-added work. The ongoing wasted salary costs are obvious. There are, however, other unseen costs. Employees who are not empowered by processes and systems become less engaged. That’s because they’re doing menial work, and are unable to follow their passions and use their talents.

So when your company’s engine misfires, you’re left with sub-optimal productivity, dissatisfied employees and turnover. In contrast, when you free people from mundane, repetitive tasks, they will spread their wings and help your company fly higher than the competition.

Working Smarter: Processes and Systems for the Office

You can, as many managers do, tell your associates to “work smarter.” But a manager’s job is to help them do it--to step back and look at the big picture. From this perspective you can determine what needs to get done and the individuals that can make it happen. Then you’re able to develop a streamlined process and the systems to put it on auto-pilot.

Although this makes sense, many companies aren’t pursuing this route. Even though a couple of decades have passed under the bridge since the early 90’s, many companies are still working with processes and tools from that period. For example, at companies across the U.S. employees are still being asked to get their jobs done using email, and a patchwork of Excel spreadsheets and Access databases.

In this scenario a marketing manager, let’s call her Eileen, is cutting and pasting numbers from one spreadsheet into another to assure all the numbers match and forecasts are up-to-date. Not only is this time consuming, it’s also prone to error and distracts Eileen from her main goal. After all, she’s supposed to be focused on understanding the customers’ needs and shaping

the strategic marketing direction. What’s more, spreadsheets just aren’t Eileen’s thing. Eventually she’ll likely move on to a new job where they have systems that allow her to spend time doing what she does best.

Because of the increased productivity and employee satisfaction that results from setting up processes and systems to help professionals, it is a core factor in your business’ success.

In our next post I’ll talk about how to start putting processes and systems in place a step by step approach to increased productivity.

Call us at 484-892-5713 or Contact Us now to schedule your free consultation, and discover how AllianceTek can help you leverage information technology for your business’ prosperity.