Three productivity tips for SMEs

For an SME, a small change can have a huge effect on margins. Founders and directors can often look at the big picture of their business and industry, but lose sight of everyday productivity strategies that can be transformative. There’s plenty of low-hanging fruit, and here are some of the opportunities that any small or medium business could take to become significantly (and even instantly) more efficient. 

1. Rethink your security

The productivity cost of poor security of obvious — if you’re shut down or held to ransom, then that’s all productivity out of the window. However, if you assess the security measures that you have in place, you might find that they’re costing you productivity. 

It will seem like mere moments each time, so it’s easy to disregard. However, over months and years, and across your team, those moments add up. It could be something like a slow multi-factor authentication process. 

If a team member is waiting for an emailed verification code that doesn’t appear, they could sit there for a while, doing nothing useful, then decide to go and make a coffee, then come back to find it’s still not there. They ask a colleague about it, who tells them to check their junk folder. Sure enough, there’s the verification email. Now the team member is annoyed as well as delayed, and increasingly hostile to security measures on the whole. 

That kind of scenario was once unavoidable, but modern security (including modern multi-factor authentication) offers a far smoother experience and can save valuable hours. 

2. Prepare for the worst

Whether it’s because of an attack or simply an accident, your systems can go down. If you aren’t prepared. then the problem can be far worse than it needs to be. 

Backing up all data to the cloud means that your staff can carry on working almost instantly, wherever they are, and you don’t have to lose hours of productivity. Then, using cloud-based telecoms, if the phone system or hardware is inaccessible, team mobiles or laptops can act as ‘soft phones’, using the same telecom platform as the office handsets. 

3. Adapt to new ways of working

On the whole, employees love hybrid working. Their bosses, however, seem to be less convinced. According to a research, 80% of bosses feel that their teams are less productive at home. That contrasts strongly with the 87% of employees who feel working remotely makes them more productive. 

If you’re part of the 80%, it doesn’t really matter whether or not your instinct is right, what matters is that you feel it. 

Hybrid work is the reality now for most office-based businesses. Forbidding it would be a source of enormous discontent, and of resignations. In the same way, allowing but resenting it is a source of tension and a productivity hindrance too. You can’t just agree to disagree on the effect of hybrid work, you have to collaborate on a solution. 

One school of thought is that if you don’t trust our teams to get the job done you’ve got bigger problems than where they work. That’s worth considering, but a more practical step is to adapt to the new hybrid world. It’s a mistake to think that hybrid work is going to function if everyone works as before, just in different places. 

The reality is that at home, there can be children and pets, phone calls, odd domestic tasks that people need to complete, and more of ‘life’ happening to your teams. Maybe that does mean they’re less productive, or maybe it just means they work as productivity, just sometimes in different patterns. 

One thing that’s safe to assume is that the work is less visible, and collaboration is less natural and that is what makes a lot of bosses nervous. Some tools and strategies can easily address that.  

Remote collaboration tools 

There is a long list of collaboration platforms available, so chances are you can find one that suits your industry, your company, and your working style. If you feel in the dark about how much is getting done and when, a central hub, where teams can update their progress on projects and share and upload files, makes sure that nobody is out of the loop. 

Cloud 

The cloud is another vital component of hybrid work. Cloud computing allows teams to save and access data and files wherever they’re working. If you rely on individually saved documents and different methods of sharing them electronically, there are countless opportunities for different versions of files and documents to exist, to get shared, to cause confusion, and to hinder the company’s productivity. 

When you’re busy growing and running a business, your IT and software are essentials that you don’t really want to think about — you’d rather they just worked.