Increase efficiency with curated templates from monday.com
Blog: Monday Project Management Blog
Efficiency is the measure of how much output you can get for each unit of input. An efficient business can get a lot of output — as profits, sales numbers, or customer engagement on social media, for example. And a business can get those things for a relatively small input of cash, work time, or daily tasks. This can be the difference between success and failure, even for the biggest companies, so finding ways to increase efficiency is a great way to increase productivity and reduce waste across the board.
Almost every team member could be more efficient with the right tools, and most processes have some wasted time and poor working habits built into them that could stand to be changed. In this article, we go over ways that you can increase efficiency of your processes using standard templates that improve your work, encourage employees to coordinate their efforts, and get the most out of the work hours they put in on every project.
Curated templates on monday.com’s Work OS can increase efficiency and speed up your workflow.
Best practices for increasing business efficiency
It’s best to keep some general guidelines in mind to increase efficiency across the board. These practices can work together or on their own, be partly implemented or adopted wholesale, and all have the advantage of helping you improve work efficiency any place they’re applied.
Automate processes
Automated workflows can get tasks done quicker than what would’ve otherwise taken longer manually. If, for instance, you have a customer service process that requires a frontline operator to triage incoming calls and refer them to the right department, you could potentially increase efficiency with an automated directory that lets callers choose the right department for themselves. Every little improvement in automating a work process has the potential to see improved returns on each unit of investment.
Encourage communication
Think about creating a work environment that’s friendly to rapid communication between team members, even those working remotely. A few minutes a day spent clarifying instructions, multiplied by dozens or hundreds of employees, shaves hours of productive time off the clock and reduces competitiveness across the board. For example, you can probably improve time management for employees who work from home if you create a shared virtual environment where it’s easy to collaborate and individuals are accountable for their time the way they would be in an office setting.
Reduce distractions and promote focus on one task at a time
Distractions come in many forms, such as multitasking. Although it might feel more productive to do multiple things at once, multitasking may actually make you fall short on task completion. When the phone keeps ringing, or when you have to answer every email within minutes of getting it, productivity inevitably suffers. Working in a standard template that’s exclusively focused on the project at hand can help with this. Workers assigned to a single task can fully immerse themselves in the flow of their immediate objectives, follow the steps laid out on the template, and get far more done than in a work environment that encourages multitasking.
Implement task management software and standardized templates
Using management software can add efficiency and organization in almost every area. With a single central hub, ideally a cloud environment that’s available to the whole team, you can encourage a clear flow of ideas and actions that cuts down on miscommunications and production snags. Changes to the template can be done from a central location, which encourages knowledgeable supervisors and team leads to implement improvements with a simple phone call.
Templates from monday.com help save time, money, and increase efficiency across all divisions and silos.
What benefits can you expect when you increase efficiency?
Increased efficiency is not an end unto itself, but work towards a goal of greater success with less effort. The idea is to get more out of every unit of work that you do, which brings several benefits, including:
- Less waste: Reducing waste can help throughput, lower costs, and decrease the carbon footprint for your office, industrial process, and environmental reports. If, for example, you have a process that requires duplication of a given form for different departments, you could save a lot of effort by keeping the information in a single central location, such as a curated template.
- Improved morale: Workers notice inefficient processes, and it can have an effect on morale. Slow, inefficient, or overcomplicated workflows can make workers feel powerless when they can’t improve them on their own. When you implement a process that reduces waste and increases each person’s productivity, the boost to workers’ morale is palpable and may result in fewer sick days, better engagement, and improved retention.
- Higher profits: Switching to a process using templates that saves a few minutes of work time, say $1 per employee per day, in a 50-employee workforce, shows up on the monthly account as an extra $1,000 you were otherwise going to spend.
- Happy customers: A customer service or sales funnel that efficiently guides customers through their interaction shows respect for the public, encourages more purchase decisions, and could even boost your brand’s following on social media, as your industry-leading approach earns loyalty and goodwill.
- Improved regulatory compliance: Adopting an efficiency-boosting template or central workflow model not only increases efficiency across the board, it makes filings and compliance measures transparent and manageable. This is especially important your business is regulated by any level of the government.
- Greater potential for growth: If you were planning to grow from 50 employees to 55 to accommodate a 10% increase in throughput next year, but this year you increased efficiency by 10%, you can skip the costly hiring and get the same improvement with the workforce you have now.
How do agile organizations increase efficiency?
Your organization should have a willingness to make continuous improvements to its workflows, build feedback into processes, and stay open to suggestions for improvement from any source. If you can find a single solution that supports all of these goals, your organization is on track to increase efficiency across the board in every area. Our DMAIC Template is ideal for project managers looking to continuously track improvements.
Three ways monday.com helps your teams boost efficiency
Using state-of-the-art cloud services and advanced work management software, monday.com can help users craft efficient processes for everything from sales and social media engagement to order fulfillment and customer service. Our customized Work OS offers several benefits your business can use to boost efficiency:
- Centralize work processes, tools, and important files: By adopting a centralized approach to cloud hosting and service, monday.com puts all the tools your team needs in a single spot for easy access and use. Our Time Study Template helps you track your time, process orders, resolve customer complaints, and communicate changes to everyone involved through a unified Work OS.
- Communicate efficiently across departments: Break down the barriers that lead to miscommunication and lost opportunities by bridging silos with a single point of reference through our Work OS. By moving all interactions onto Work OS, you can give and take access, form and divide teams, and rearrange as needed, which helps boost efficiency, employee participation, and idea sharing.
- Create a standard process and format: Learning a single OS that works for everybody simplifies almost every other part of your business. monday.com’s Recruitment and Onboarding Template ensures new employees can onboard more efficiently.
Curated templates that support efficient teams
monday.com has templates you can use to support one, several, or all of your organization’s divisions. Our teams have crafted an advanced HR Services Template, as well as templates for sales, customer service, workflow management, time management, and many other areas where efficiency is at a premium. With templates curated on our own servers, you get access to the latest security and service patches, fast response times, and always-excellent technical support.
FAQs
What do we mean by efficiency?
Efficiency is simply the relationship between inputs and outputs, with an emphasis on getting the highest outputs for every input you invest. With a curated template system, for example, you can cut overhead and speed up processes to increase efficiency and get more than you put in.
What increases efficiency in the workplace?
Efficiency goes up with faster processes, fewer steps to each process, and as much automation as possible. Curated templates can help with that by creating a unified process for every task, all on a single Work OS.
The post Increase efficiency with curated templates from monday.com appeared first on monday.com Blog.
Leave a Comment
You must be logged in to post a comment.
