Efficiency is crucial within any business, but it can make the difference between flourishing and declining for small firms.
Even a single delayed task can create a domino effect, disrupting the workflow and potentially preventing an entire project from being completed on schedule. With this failure to meet expectations often comes unsatisfied clients, which can lead to a lack of trust, a loss in revenue, and damage to your firm’s reputation.
According to Zippia, more than 80% of workers don’t have a time management system – they just take on tasks as they arise. It’s not hard to figure out how this lack of structured workflows can result in conflicting priorities and a significant loss in productivity. Without defined workflows, teams can waste time, duplicate efforts, and miss key deadlines.
So what can your firm do to change the tide? Here, we cover common task prioritization obstacles faced by small firms and three practical ways to create efficient workflows within your team.
Challenges of Prioritizing Tasks in Small Firms
Effective workflow, more specifically, task prioritization, can often be more challenging in small business environments than in large corporations. A few factors that hinder small teams from managing their workload include the following:
- Limited resources: Small firms don’t have access to the same amount of resources as larger firms. Team members often must juggle varying responsibilities and wear multiple hats to get the job done, which can make them feel like they’re constantly being pulled in multiple directions.
- Managing multiple client accounts: It’s extremely common for employees in small firms to handle multiple clients simultaneously. This can lead to constant context switching and competing priorities, which can make it difficult to determine which tasks to focus on first.
- Lack of delegation opportunities: Small teams have fewer options to delegate work to other employees when they feel overloaded because there are often few people who work beneath them, if any, and everyone is just as busy.
- Absence of clarity: Clients don’t always give thorough feedback, which can lead to ambiguous direction on when a task is due and how to complete it. Employees then have to spend time figuring out how to accomplish a goal that’s unclear from the beginning.
3 Ways to Achieve Efficient Workflows in Your Small Business
Creating an efficient workflow among every team member is essential for the success of your firm, and technology is the biggest driver of efficiency. A lot of these challenges can be solved by implementing tools like workforce management software, which can support employees with features for time management, task tracking, goal planning, and more. These tools also help teams to prioritize their responsibilities and enhance workflow management, making it easier to build and maintain effective workflows that keep everyone aligned, organized, and productive.
Here are three ways you can use technology as an aid to save your small business time and money through greater efficiency.
1. Strategically Allocate Your Resources
Proper resource allocation helps you maximize your firm’s productivity by making sure the right employees are in the right roles at the right time. With a workforce management solution, you can easily assign tasks to team members based on their job description, current bandwidth, and schedule availability.
This allows you to match employees with new projects based on their strengths, which typically also aligns with the work they can do most efficiently. It also helps you avoid putting too much work on one employee at any given time, which can quickly lead to burnout.
2. Stay Organized with Task-Tracking Tools
Your team members need a clear understanding of their responsibilities so they can effectively prioritize them. Project management software keeps track of every task for every project and their due dates – all in a single platform.
With visuals like progress bars, it takes only a quick glance for employees to know how they’re progressing with a project and to see the impact they’re making. Staff and leaders are seamlessly aligned thanks to the visibility they have into tasks, such as:
- Which tasks are being actively worked on
- Any tasks that need to be assigned or reallocated among the team
- How much time is being spent on each task
- The percentage of the whole project that has been completed
3. Implement Workflow Automation
Nothing is as efficient as making time-consuming manual tasks disappear entirely. Workforce management software enables your team to automate a number of tedious to-dos, such as:
- Time tracking
- Scheduling
- Budget monitoring
- Billing and invoicing
- Forecasting
- Documentation
By automating administrative tasks, employees can focus on higher-value work. And as an added bonus, fewer manual processes means fewer errors, so your team can be more productive and more accurate – important factors for sustaining and growing your firm.
Streamline Your Business Projects and Workflow With coAmplifi
Effective task management plays a key part in optimizing your workflows, and technology makes project tracking and reporting easier than ever. Keep employees and clients happy while experiencing cost savings by giving your team members the tools they need to do their best work.
A workforce management system, coAmplifi is packed with tools and features that empower you to take greater control over your firm’s inner workings. Save time and money with every project. Schedule your demo now!
