Increasing Organisational Efficiency: 5 Top Tips

Business Insights
30/06/2021


An organisation that’s inefficient isn’t operating as its best. For businesses, this equates to a reduction in productivity and, therefore, lost profits. By increasing efficiency, however, companies can optimise productivity and profitability metrics and achieve greater commercial success.

But how can you increase efficiency without putting staff under too much pressure or letting the quality of your outputs slide? To find out, take a look at these five top tips and get ready to maximise efficiency within your organisation now:

1. Take a Companywide Approach

Ineffective processes can lurk in every aspect of your organisation, which means it’s vital to take a companywide approach when you’re optimising efficiency. Many business owners focus solely on sales and marketing or inventory management and production as they believe these are the areas that are most integral to their success. While these departments certainly need to be operating efficiently in order to maximise profits, every process and aspect of your operations has the potential to be either efficient or inefficient.

Inevitably, one process affects another, so it doesn’t take long for one ineffective workflow to affect others. By taking a companywide approach, however, you can identify inefficient processes at every level and take steps to improve them.

2. Educate Staff About Efficiency

Many people assume that being more efficient simply means working faster. Telling staff to ‘increase efficiency’ can have a negative impact if the instruction is misconstrued. In fact, when employees are under too much pressure to increase their speeds, it can result in increased errors and reduced output quality.

Instead, increasing efficiency should focus on cutting out waste, shortening business processes and, therefore, delivering more. Essentially, staff will be ‘working smarter’, but not necessarily harder. By educating staff about efficiency, you can garner their support and ensure they’re onboard as workflows are adjusted and new processes are introduced.

3. Know Which Costs to Cut

Cost-cutting is an important part of business management. When you can keep costs low, a higher percentage of your revenue is profit, thus increasing your business success. However, cutting the wrong costs can actually lead to inflated expenditure in other areas or unnecessary losses caused by inefficiency.

If you use IT managed services to keep your tech infrastructure functional and secure, for example, you might pay £1,000 a month to your provider and benefit from immediate responses and first-time fixes, for example. When another provider comes along and offers to do the job for £300 a month, this might seem like a savvy way to reduce your company expenditure. However, if the service then declines, your systems become less secure and you experience more downtime, the subsequent costs you’ll incur will be far higher than what you’re ‘saving’.

As you can see, cost-cutting isn’t solely about finding the cheapest resources for your business. Instead, it’s about reducing expenditure in a way that benefits your business, rather than damages it.

4. Enhance Employees to Reach Their Potential

Staff who are happy and motivated tend to operate more productivity, which obviously has a positive impact on your business. When employees are nurtured and given the tools they need to reach their potential, you gain far more value from them and increase the job satisfaction. Furthermore, employee loyalty increases when you invest in your staff and help them to achieve their professional goals.

With performance management software, you can get the most of your teams, encourage employees to reach their potential and use automation to monitor performance more efficiently. StaffCircle incorporates appraisal software to make performance reviews more meaningful and actionable. Additionally, employee development dashboards and individual performance monitoring gives you the tools you need to optimise organisational efficiency and nurture and retain top talent.

5. Implement Strong Leadership

Weak leadership or conflicting company goals can have a disastrous impact on the ethos and performance of any business. Without strong leadership, quality can slide, employees become demotivated, and targets are ignored.

In contrast, strong leadership motivates employees at all levels and sets the tone for how the organisation will operate. By having a clear vision in place, staff will know what role they play in achieving organisational objectives and why their contribution matters.

Start Optimising Efficiency Now

Now you know why efficiency rates are so important in business and how you can optimise efficiency within your own organisation, you’ll be eager to get started. However, it’s important to have an accurate insight into your current efficiency baseline, so that improvements can be measured and monitored.

Conducting an efficiency audit gives you the opportunity to assess how efficient your organisation currently is. Similarly, this type of audit often uncovers inefficient processes and enables you to implement changes. Following this, regular audits will tell you how effective these changes are and what impact they’re having. As a result, you can monitor organisational efficiency and use it as a key metric when determining your success.