How to Leverage Your Human Resources to Achieve Your Business Goals

Within a company, you have several assets. You have your liquid assets, your invested assets, and all the elements of your business that constitute your operational arms. But, perhaps most importantly, you have people – workers who are willing to graft for hours each week to work towards the goals you set in the board room. To leverage this all-important asset effectively, you need to work towards efficiency and productivity in your workforce, and this guide will explain how you can achieve that leap.

Managing Your Resources

Next up, you should consider how you’re organizing your workforce to get the best out of them every day. This is less about man-management and more about the structures that facilitate the efficient work of all your staff – and your ability to be flexible with workloads and projects. 

Using software developed to help HR departments can solve structural issues in your workforce, freeing up labor to work on different and more exciting projects. OKR software can help you not only organize your workforce but also spread tasks evenly between your employees – and translate goals drawn up in the board room to actionable smaller tasks for all your staff to rally around.

Motivation

Amongst workers, motivation is as important as skills and knowledge. The most motivated staff will solve problems without consulting a manager and will go the extra mile to get projects finished by their deadlines and to put in the extra hours to meet their targets. In contrast, demotivated staff are far less likely to pull towards a common goal – leading your business to lower efficiency and missed targets.

Motivating your staff can be difficult. It requires a blend of contractual benefits – like better pay and perks like healthcare – and managerial nous, which will help employees feel they’re valued on a personal level. Regarding the latter, if your managers can organize frequent meetings with the staff that works under them, they’ll be able to receive and give feedback – motivating staff to feel they’re being invested in by their superiors.

Incentives and Rewards

Finally, if you’re pushing to get your business to the next level, you’ll be setting ambitious targets that all of your workforce will be striving towards. Whether those targets involve sales figures, profit percentages, overhead cost reductions, or marketing successes, it’s important to set these goals – but also then offer incentives and rewards for staff when you manage to hit them. 

A reward can take many forms. An office party can help you celebrate when you hit the customer figures you’ve been aiming for, while an investment in your office environment, following a successful scale-up, can reward employees by improving the space in which they work. You should also consider personal rewards – like vouchers, pay rises, or company-wide recognition – for those whose work contributes the most to the realization of your business goals in 2020 and beyond.

Use these three tips to leverage your human resources for the good of your business, making your staff a key asset in your up-scaling and target-meeting.

Take A Load Off - Work Smarter

When you run a small business, you need to work harder… or do you? Working smarter can mean those dreams you had about spending more time with your family or doing the things you love are a reality. 

As a one-person business, you have to do a lot with the time that you have. There are a few ways that you can increase your output. You could opt to put in longer hours, or you can make your hours really count.

Photo by krisna iv on Unsplash

So here are a few tips that can make your time more productive. 

Deadlines

If you aren’t already setting deadlines, you are missing a trick. Adding deadlines to work means you are more likely to get things done in a good time. Parkinson’s Law means a task will take as long as the time you allow. 
So if there is no deadline, it is improbable to get finished as quickly as it could. Use your preferred calendar and add deadlines to everything. 

Field It Out

If you are spending a lot of time dealing with calls or managing your emails, it is time you gave that workout. You might think of this as a waste of your hard-earned cash, but actually, you can earn more in that time you typically use on calls and other admin. 

Live receptionist services and a virtual assistant will help you tackle the jobs that take up the time that doesn’t earn you money directly. 

No Notifications

If you have your phone in view, then every WhatsApp message or text is going to take your attention away from the work you should be doing. And when you stop in the middle of your work to respond, you are going to lose minutes. 

Not just the ones it takes you to reply. But you will lose 15-20 minutes of time every time you switch between tasks and need to refocus again. 

Deep Work

While there is a lot to be said for taking regular breaks, deep working is the new kid on the block. You can begin to practice your deep working by timing 30-minute slots. During those 30 minutes, you only work on a single task. 

Try to pick something that takes concentration and requires you to think actively. Over time you can ramp that up to around 90 minutes. You shouldn’t typically push beyond 90 minutes, though. As research finds that over 90 minutes, there is no extra focus or productivity. 

Multitasking

If you have, say, nine photos to schedule on your social media but are editing and uploading one by one. You are wasting a huge amount of time swapping between the tasks. Instead, switch to:

• Editing all the images

• Writing all of the captions

• Scheduling all of the photos on your chosen platform. 

So performing similar tasks at the same time. Commit to single tasks before moving on to anything else. 

Perfection…? 

We all get very hung up and absorbed in the little details. And while we should all strive to achieve our best, if you are always looking for perfection, things become much more difficult. Perfection, to some degree, is an illusion. 

Aim to meet each task to the very best of your ability and allow time, in the end, to neaten up edit and ‘perfect.’ 

Eat The Frog

If you put off the tasks you don’t want to do until the end of the day - it will always take longer than it should. So first thing in the morning, do the tasks that you least want to get done. Eat the frog, and move on. 

This leaves no space in your brain for that task to occupy, and you can concentrate fully on other tasks. 

Time Track

If you feel like you are spending too much time on some tasks - the chances are you are. So start tracking your time for a few weeks and see if you can improve those times. 

Consider the time that you want to close your computer - and get your to-do list done before that time. 

Breaks

Yes, it is important to work, but you can’t work at full capacity if you aren’t taking breaks regularly. Rather than take random breaks as and when factor them into your day. This will allow you to have lots of time that you are high performing. 

The Pomodoro method is ideal for people who want to build focus time and breaks into their day. 

Always look to increase productivity - not extend your working hours.