11.22.2022 | Posted by Erik
9 Tips for Making Your Team More Efficient
As we prepare to enter a new year, many business owners and leaders are wondering how to boost efficiency in their organizations. With skill shortages, supply chain issues, and competition on the rise, businesses must figure out how to do more with less while increasing their bottom lines.
That’s where efficiency comes into play; it’s all about optimizing productivity and finding ways to minimize wasted efforts. From employee care to your books and accounts receivables, there are many ways to make your company more efficient.
Here are our tips as an outsource receivables management firm.
9 Tips for Boosting Efficiency in Your Organization
Here are our top tips for increasing efficiency in your organization.
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Incorporate Automation When Possible
Automation eliminates manual tasks and allows your employees to focus on what matters. It also tends to boost productivity. In fact, IT leaders find that automation saves between 10-50% in time and operating costs. Simple repetitive tasks are not only a drag on efficiency, but they’re also employee morale killers. Around 90% of employees agree that repetitive tasks contribute to low morale and attrition.
Whether you’re automating office tasks like email check-ins, password resets, payment follow-ups, or employee onboarding—or automating manual labor via equipment in the manufacturing and retail space, automation is a smart way to make your team more efficient.
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Focus on Employee Well-Being
Stress and burnout can dramatically reduce an employee’s productivity. As a result, more companies are finding ways to improve their employee well-being with initiatives like adding wellness plans and implementing new policies to foster a better work-life balance.
Companies that focus on well-being can expect a massive boost in productivity. For example, companies that add a workplace wellness program see an average 66% improvement in their overall productivity.
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Make Your Payment Process Frictionless
Tedious payment processes can bottleneck productivity. If it’s hard to pay invoices, you can expect hang-ups with payments. To combat invoicing issues, be sure you’re sending invoices to the best contact at the best time and that you’ve streamlined your payment and follow-up process in a predictable cadence.
You can further reduce payment hurdles by accepting multiple forms of payment, including ACH, wire, credit card, online payments, and checks. As long as the option isn’t too expensive for your margins, making payments as painless as possible is essential.
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Standardize and Organize Your Follow-Up Process
Follow-ups are an important part of any organization’s success. Sales, marketing, and accounts receivable all require regular follow-up activities. But too often, companies don’t standardize or automate these processes, causing essential details to slip through the cracks, and efficiency to suffer.
Take time to create a standardized follow-up sequence for all your departments. Know exactly when and how often your employees should perform follow-ups and automate them when you can.
Read more: How much will AR outsourcing cost me?
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Test Out Different Tools to Improve Communication with Customers
Effective customer communication is critical to efficient operations. Take a look at how your team communicates with customers and see what’s working and what isn’t. For example, you might find that your team sends a lot of emails even though your customers prefer text messages.
Find which communication tools work best for customers and use those mediums to engage with them. Whether you’re trying to close the deal, nurture a relationship, or collect payment, reaching out to the customer in a way that works for them will always yield better and quicker results.
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Try to Quantify Everything
When it comes to boosting productivity, objectivity is crucial, and nothing is as objective as numbers. That’s why you should find ways to quantify everything. If you can break down jobs into the most important pieces and assign them values, you can track them to understand your baseline averages.
It starts by determining your KPIs (key performance indicators) and creating productivity goals from them. For example, you might find that your most profitable salespeople make 120 calls a month. That’s a quantifiable metric.
When you quantify pieces of the job, you’ll know that any monthly increases to those averages will increase efficiency and profitability. Also, be sure to tweak and review your processes and averages as you go.
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Consider Other Workflow Management Tools
Workflow management systems can dramatically improve your company’s efficiency since these platforms were usually built with efficiency in mind. So rather than sticking with what you know, consider upgrading some of your processes using workflow management tools.
Some examples of workflow management tools include productivity suites, CRMs, communication platforms, project management platforms, sales automation systems, marketing automation platforms, AR systems, and more.
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Audit Your Processes to Find Potential Problem Spots
Auditing involves objectively looking at your processes and seeing what’s working and what isn’t. When you’re talking about formal audits, they require an outside, independent examiner to ensure everything’s up to snuff. While you don’t have to hire someone from outside your company to look at what’s happening, you do need to remove your rose-colored glasses to see which parts of your company work efficiently and which don’t.
If you aren’t sure where to start, consider starting with AR (it’s where any good outsource receivables management firm would start). Analyze the invoices that are the farthest past due and find out the actual reason they’re late. Don’t just assume why there are delays. Problems with services or products typically manifest themselves in receivables. When you see a trend, find where the breakdown is and fix that.
Read more: Final steps to take if you can’t get paid.
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Outsource What You Can
Much like automation, outsourcing is a terrific way to eliminate unnecessary burdens for your team. Removing non-essential tasks from your team’s workflow frees up their time to focus on the activities that matter most to your business. Additionally, when you outsource, you’re assigning an activity that isn’t your company’s strength to a company specializing in that specific responsibility.
For example, your company likely doesn’t specialize in accounts receivables. But when your customers don’t pay, your employees are probably tasked with getting those invoices paid. Since collections aren’t your team’s specialty, though, they aren’t going to be particularly efficient at it. On the other hand, If you outsource AR, you can rest easy knowing you’ve enlisted a team that specializes in outsource receivables management.
Start Boosting Your Efficiency by Outsourcing Your AR
Thankfully, there are several ways to boost efficiency in your company. The most important thing is to be intentional about it. Make increasing efficiency a central goal and follow the tips in this article to work towards it.
If you want to start increasing efficiency today in a way that directly contributes to the bottom line, consider outsourcing your accounts receivable management.
Here at Axim, we specialize in efficient, customer-centric outsourced receivables management. With a proven track record, we’re dedicated to helping companies like yours free up their team’s time and get paid timelier.