Top 5 Mistakes Offices Make
1. Leaving your office cluttered
Clutter in the office hurts productivity; if your paper documents are a mess it’s like finding a needle in the haystack when you need to get a specific transaction or record. To clear the clutter and save your team time, go paperless. A paperless office stores and processes their documents all online, making it easier to find documents quickly, recover lost documents, and collaborate on documents with your team. If you’re interested in turning your office paperless, take a look at our guide or read our article on how your office could benefit from going paperless.
2. Avoiding technology
Technology is everywhere, it makes life easier and it saves a huge amount of time for offices. If your office avoids technology, it misses out on leveraging modern software and applications to increase productivity, as well as save time and money. Here are a few ways you could use technology in your office:
- Use a tool like Locale Central to replace your paper forms and checklists.
- Use a tool like Xero for your invoicing, purchase orders, and receipts.
- Use a tool like Notion as a knowledge base for your office.
3. Not automating time consuming tasks
On the topic of technology, automation is a great way to save time spent doing repetitive tasks. A lot of software and applications have automation built into it, such as you can automatically send invoice reminders with Xero, filter emails with most mailing apps, and even integrate two apps together using a tool like Zapier.
Automation doesn’t only save you time, but it also improves the quality and accuracy of your work. By using automation to carry out a process, you can expect that the same inputs will give you the same outputs, reducing the room for human errors to occur in your business processes.
4. Poor communication
Effective communication is the foundation of a good office. Encourage keeping an open line of communication between everyone in the office, making sure that everybody knows who to contact for what problem or question, and how to best reach out to them. Regular team meetings, such as daily standups between teams, also helps improve office communication by giving your workers a chance to communicate any challenges that they need help with, which in turn improves the productivity and morale of your office.
5. Not using insights to make business decisions
Every business decision you make should be backed by insights that support your conclusion. Without having insights to leverage in an office, business decisions can be prone to bias and a “gut-feeling” that can lead you in the wrong direction. To enable the ability to collect insights from your office, use technology that not only captures your critical business data, but allows you to view it in a way that’s beneficial for your decision making process.
