Streamlining administration processes within your workplace can have a multitude of positive benefits from increasing employee productivity and engagement, to reduced manual errors, reduced clutter and a much more pleasant place to work.
A streamlined workplace aids in creating a calm, productive environment, free from clutter, where your team can concentrate fully on their tasks at hand.
Our top 5 tips for creating a streamlined workplace are:
1. Reduce the amount of paper you use
Our default from a pre-technology office legacy is to print and file important documents. With the accessibility of networked computers, it is all too easy for everyone to print without thinking. This can result in excess clutter, waste and expense.
Consider encouraging your employees to adopt a paper-free workplace. Guide your teams to be mindful of what they’re printing and how often they print, and encourage them to really consider whether they need to print that particular document. Implement digital filing guidelines so that files are easily accessed when needed across the business. By reinforcing this change over time and helping your teams break habits, you’ll find that you’ll reduce the clutter and streamline your workplace.
2. Reduce unnecessary meetings
The biggest time-sap in organisations is holding unnecessary meetings, or letting their meetings run unnecessarily long. Trivial meetings can tie up time, resources and halt productivity. Next time you’re in a meeting, mentally add up the hourly rate of every person sitting in the room. Multiply this by the duration of the meeting, and you’ll be shocked at the sheer cost of simply holding that meeting. That doesn’t even take into account the lost productivity of everyone stopping their day jobs and sitting in the meeting room for that length of time. Not the mention the travel time it took to get everyone together in that same room for the meeting.
Consider encouraging your team to think twice about whether a meeting is necessary. Equip them with technology such as instant messaging, project management apps, Skype for Business etc, so that they can pre-assess whether a meeting is necessary, or whether it would be more efficient and more effective to discuss the topic over email, instant message or a quick Skype call. You’ll be surprised at how much time and money your organisation saves by streamlining your communications and eliminating unnecessary meetings.
3. Streamline accounting and invoicing processes
Accounts Payable and Accounts Receivable is an administration-heavy, yet essential part of running a business. The importance of these two functions, ensuring cashflow management and reporting is timely and accurate is paramount to a profitable business.
Ensure that your accounts teams are supported with effective technology that assists them in accurately and efficiently doing their job. Streamlining data entry through shared data transfer between different departments of the business can help reduce the headaches that come with record keeping, such as manual entry errors, double-entry errors, and general misinformation.
The efficiency and accuracy of your accounts department can be the make or break of your business, so streamlining is a must.
4. Automate your rostering
With all of the moving parts that come with running a community service provider business from different staff categories such as Full-time, Casual, Remote etc, to differing locations (in-office, in-field, warehouse staff etc), roster generation can be an ongoing jigsaw, creating frustration and angst among everyone in the business.
Support your roster generating staff with dedicated software that streamlines the rostering process, taking into account client service delivery times and locations, and cross-referencing with available staff. Modular software such as CARETAG takes this one step further by automatically creating time-sheets through their tap-on/tap-off functionality that records when a person has delivered a service, synchronising the information with payroll and invoicing applications.
Streamlining your rostering process is essential to reduce interpersonal conflict and will help foster a more harmonious working environment.
5. Automate your company mileage claims
Relying on your staff to manually log their company car usage and accurately record their mileage is fraught with danger. Not only does the risk of human-error play a big part in this, the time it takes to fill out the log books and mileage claims adds up and at the end of the year can result in significant productivity loss, which comes at a cost of your business.
Consider streamlining your reporting by integrating GPS technology with automated software. This will run in the background, recording the mileage and then automatically transfer that data to your accounts/administration records, for reconciliation and payment, freeing your in-field staff up to concentrate on delivering services to your clients.
CARETAG is a purpose-built, client-centric service delivery system, designed to address the challenges of service providers in the community care industry, specifically National Disability Insurance Scheme providers and Aged Care providers. CARETAG is the only truly mobile application of its kind, operating regardless of mobile internet connectivity, enabling real-time reporting, reducing paperwork and administration time. Click here to read more about how CARETAG can help streamline and increase productivity in your workplace.
