Increasing and maintaining productivity is the key to growing any business. Particularly in business-to-business (B2B) enterprises, it is likely there will be high expectations of results from your corporate clientele. If you operate from a traditional office, there are some well-established ways to ensure your staff functions at peak levels.
But things aren’t always quite so straightforward if your enterprise exists primarily online. There are certainly distinct advantages to working remotely — you have access to a global talent pool and can cultivate agility. But it can also present additional challenges to ramping up the momentum of your productivity.
Whether it’s to help meet your internal goals or to meet the expectations of your clients, you need to strategize your route to productivity.
Understand Your Goals
Simply deciding you want to increase productivity can be quite an abstract concept. Every business wants their staff, tools, and themselves to work harder and faster. But you’ll usually find that without specifics of what business practices you need to see improvements in, it’s unlikely you’ll make much headway.
Productivity goals in most in-person businesses are largely linked to office-based practices. You need to spend a little time assessing the practices and protocols of your online company and refining your intentions. Specify what you need to see improvements in. Clarify why these can make a difference to the trajectory of your business. Most importantly, establish what equates to success in your online B2B company that will be directly influenced by aspects of employee productivity.
You should support this by also pinpointing the online information you need to track to measure output in different areas. Particularly in your digital marketing efforts, you must understand how metrics can build an accurate picture of your current rate of productivity and its impact on campaigns. This includes looking at aspects like customer retention, engagement, and lead-to-sale conversions as both individual elements and a combined package.
Learning about and reviewing such metrics can also give you insights into how you can optimize your tracking. One of the most important results of focusing on this is gaining clarity on what elements are most important and which have a direct influence on workers. From here you can start to solidify where you need to adjust working practices and adopt new tools.
Identify the Hurdles
When businesses aim to improve productivity there is a tendency to view this from the perspective that workers are simply not operating at their peak ability. This is particularly the case with online businesses where remote workers are left unsupervised for most of their day. However, it’s important to note it may not be the actions of employees to blame here — they may have roadblocks that limit their ability to work efficiently.
As such, to boost productivity, you need to identify these hurdles. You can start by reaching out to employees themselves. They’ll often have greater insights into the challenges of their jobs than you will as the leader of your organization. It can be worth facilitating a group meeting in this regard so they can talk through the various aspects of their daily routines, highlight common challenges, and maybe even develop solutions.
However, you can’t just rely on opinion. In some circumstances, employees may not be fully aware there are hurdles. Thankfully, online operations generate a significant amount of data on activities, behavior, and results you can use to better understand systemic issues. A professional business analyst can help you transform this raw information into practical insights that inform your needs and goals. They’ll identify the most relevant data sets, use a range of analytical practices, and then interpret the results so you can collaborate in finding better routes forward.
Armed with accurate and quantifiable data on the roadblocks, you can then start to plan how to remove or overcome them. This can include redesigning tasks to avoid problematic practices. It may be looking into new software or hardware tools that empower workers to be productive despite potential challenges.
Maximize Efficiency
Achieving productivity isn’t just about introducing new methods to employees to boost their output. It’s also about what you can cut back on. Efficiency is a key contributor to productivity and there could be elements of your company that need significant streamlining. This is particularly prevalent in online businesses where disparate remote employees may have different approaches to the way they perform the same tasks.
Start by examining the workflow for every major task in your organization. Work with department heads and individual employees to establish whether the current approach is really the most efficient way to reach the end goal. It can be helpful to create visual diagrams of these processes so you can better understand what aspects are repeating and where tasks can be condensed or even eliminated.
This doesn’t necessarily mean you should standardize all your operations into strict practices. After all, remote workers often function best when they’re not micromanaged. They also need space for creativity and innovation. But it’s worth having conversations about their workflows and examining efficiency as part of your regular one-to-one meetings with them.
Alongside your processes, you need to consider whether the tools you and your staff are using are operating at peak performance. As a digital business, the efficient running of your servers is essential to achieving maximum productivity. Implementing a capacity management strategy can reduce undue pressure on your servers and ensure you meet the needs of your consumers. This involves adjusting the number and activities of your staff in line with the changing needs of the business. It’s an agile approach to the online market that boosts profits, customer experience, and employee productivity.
Conclusion
A high level of productivity can directly affect your success, but this can be especially challenging for online businesses. It’s vital to gain clarity on where you need your productivity to be focused and gain a deeper understanding of the hurdles that may be standing in the way. Finding avenues to improve efficiency can also impact your ability to meet the needs of your customers and increase profits.
