How to Increase Productivity in Your Business

Do you keep a “to-do list” on what you wish to accomplish each day? There may have been a point in time where you did this quite routinely, and perhaps it has dropped out. Most people will make a list of things they wish to accomplish in the morning and by the end of the day they didn’t get one thing off the list done. Sometimes this becomes so bad that many business owners decide not to even keep a daily to-do list anymore and just walk into the office and wait till the first employee gives them an order of what they need, and the owner does it for them. This is a backwards way of thinking.

The simplicity of placing a couple of targets on a to-do list and making that your known goal and overcoming whatever those not unknowable obstacles are in order to achieve that end, would make you more happy. Simply speaking, if you got your to-do list done each day, how would you feel at the end of the day? Would you feel good or bad? Likely good. Accomplishing any target or any goal that you set out to do will make you happy.

Too often there are a variety of different barriers that get in the way of achieving one’s goal. The unfortunate thing is we tend to put attention on the things that stop us, and not attention on things that allow us to win. Look at today. What are the problems that you are trying to handle outside of the basic production for the day? It’s likely that these problems do not have any impact on your expansion even if you never handled them at all.

Sometimes it is important to recognize the barriers that are in front of you that keep you from achieving your goal and just ignore them. Sometimes the best thing that you can do is nothing while carrying forward towards reaching your known goal. Let’s take a look at how simple this can be accomplished. Let’s say you walk into your office on Monday morning, and you look at how production occurred the prior week, and you have an immediate staff meeting, for say 30 minutes, and you say, with confidence that “we are going to get our production up by 10% before the end of the week.” And then you pose the question to the group: “what can each of you do?” Insist they actually give you an answer to this problem. And then write it down on your to-do list -- those steps that your staff said they could do to get your statistics up by 10% that week. And those would be your known sub-goals toward the overall goal of a rise of production by 10%. And then you overcome whatever obstacles are in the way of achieving those goals until you accomplish the end result you are searching for. Certainly you do this fairly routinely. Most business owners do this or if they don’t, they should be.

This inability or difficulty in getting things done transcends from the owner to the staff. If you give your staff random orders without any recognition of what is important and what’s not, the staff member will take the unimportant to be equal to the vital task. So it is key for you to delegate towards expansion.
By simply delegating toward expansion, putting together a real list of actions to take each day that will result in expansion and completing what is on the list you will increase the productivity of your business. It is that simple.

What do most Business Owners Have in Common?

Over the years I have dealt with all types and sizes of businesses. I have seen all types and sizes of problems as well as quite a variety of solutions that emerge to resolve them. Throughout my experiences in consulting various companies and working to unravel the difficulties they sometimes encounter a very basic common denominator is always present. That common denominator is the inability to confront or perceive what is really
going on.

Now, there can be a number of ways that that common denominator manifests itself. It can be an owner or manager who is unable to face staff so turns a blind eye to what may be happening in the various areas. It might be that there is too much “wishful thinking” going on because confronting what the “dangerous” scene really is unpalatable. It may also be something as simple as not being able to perceive because one has no information in an area such as statistics that reflect the production and viability of the company.

Most businesses to some degree or another use statistics. Few however use them to measure the individual production of each staff member or areas of the practice. It can seem like a formidable task but it doesn’t have to be if one has a basic understanding of organization and what products are really important to its survival.

If an individual staff knows what it is he or she is supposed to produce and it can be measured then it is not difficult to assign him a statistic that will reflect
his production.

One of the first steps in solving the common denominator is being able to measure one’s production so that one can confront and “see”.

This is an amazing step for most people as it puts them into a position where they can now be in charge of what happens in their own practice as, for the first time, they can actually “see what’s happening.”