Every form of waste can negatively influence business and profitability. But it can be especially difficult when that waste impacts your operational costs. Every company, government entities included, will have some overhead. If you’re not diligent, waste can spiral out of control and impact your bottom line. Fortunately, there are a variety of ways you can reduce these costs and keep organizational spending under control. Saving money and reducing spending can be easier than you think. Here are 4 of the best ways to reduce overhead.
- Streamline Internal Communications
Internal communications are a huge drain on your organization’s profitability and productivity. Take a look at these stats:
- 71% of employees spend over 2 hours per week on work caused by poor communication
- $37 billion per year is spent on unproductive meetings – about $1500 per meeting!
One of the most impactful ways to reduce costs is to streamline the way your company communicates important content. It’s not just about the tools you use to communicate – it’s about creating structure, defining which channels to use when, what requires a meeting, and managing expectations. Some daily communication tools can be disruptive – make sure you develop guidelines to reduce extraneous communication and refine when to use which tools.
At the end of the day, the goal is to keep communication meaningful and simple. Be bold: cut down on empty communication methods and create space for productive time outside of meetings. Above all, approach communication guidelines from a company-wide perspective – don’t leave standardization up to individual teams. Creating a widely accessible knowledge base via Sharepoint is a good start.
2. Know how you spend your time
It’s no surprise that greater time efficiency yields higher operational cost savings. But it’s hard to optimize if you don’t have a good idea of where your time is spent. Thankfully, automatic time trackers like Timesheet can do this job for you, revealing many areas to save you money such as:
- Increasing productivity: automatic time trackers can help your employees self-manage their day. They (and you!) can pinpoint how much time is spent of different tasks, where interruptions affect workflow, and what slows them down. Understanding these deficiencies is the key to introducing effective change
- Quantify client value: time tracking can also show you which projects and clients are profitable in the short and long-term. You can easily determine ROI and know where to charge more and which clients to prioritize
3. Automate low-value tasks
Automation is an easy solution for any business looking to save money. If a task is repetitive, low-value, and easily reproducible, you can hand it over to a machine. This makes sense – pay your employees to use their high-level skills and abilities, not wasting potentially productive time on administrative tasks.
There’s more opportunity than ever to automate tasks using artificial intelligence and machine learning. Automating minutes, expense tracking, email management, and more is all possible. Ask your employees what processes drain their time and energy – and therefore your budget. An added bonus – employee satisfaction increases and people feel much more engaged while doing deep work instead of menial tasks.
4. Use only what you need
In the world of efficiency and productivity tools, there’s almost an infinite number of tools, processes, and products available to use. Take a hard look at how your company works and determining what tools you really need: look at your current subscriptions, who uses them and how often. You may find you’re paying for far more tools than you need or use. In addition, consider how much time your people spend on these tools – many add to the administrative burden while not adding enough value to your bottom line. Consider going paperless and consolidating your tools and subscription budget.
