• Survey
  • Book Becky to speak
  • The book: Small Town Rules
  • Shop Local video
  • SaveYour.Town

Small Biz Survival

The small town and rural business resource

A row of small town shops
  • Front Page
  • Latest stories
  • About
  • Guided Tour
  • Subscribe
  • Privacy Policy
  • Contact
  • RSS

Small business time savers

By Small Biz Survival

[Denise McGill is back, with another smart guest post. Today, she wants to help you save some time in your day.]
 
How many productive hours are lost in a typical day due to lack of training, standardization or outdated materials? Utilizing time management and having the tools to be productive can cause fewer headaches for business owners and increase employee job satisfaction. Removing the roadblocks and frustrations that employees come across, makes them more efficient.
 
If you or an employee is spending longer than necessary to prepare correspondence or a spreadsheet for a meeting in the morning, then these five tips will increase performance and save time normally lost during the workday.
 
Create templates or master forms for email correspondence – This is a huge time saver whether you are a sole proprietor or a large corporation. For instance if you have a technical support department and find the same questions popping up over and over again, design a standard email response to answer those questions. Of course, you are free to tweak those emails as necessary, but a template gives a foundation to build on. A well thought out email response presents a standardized response, appears professional and eliminates spelling errors as well
 
Include an automatic email signature – Full contact information should be included with every email sent. You can easily utilize this function within your email software. Don’t make customers search for contact information.
 
Learn to use the software on your computer – Hours of productivity and time management can be lost in a day if you have employees that cannot adequately use the basic functions available on a spreadsheet or word document. Not knowing how to format or use basic formulas can have an employee laboring over a project needlessly and ultimately missing deadlines. If the budget is tight, have an internal employee teach the basics of the computer software your company uses – it is well worth the day spent to bring everyone up to speed.
 
Prepare job function manuals – Lose the tribal knowledge mentality. As employees leave the business, they take their knowledge with them. Job descriptions with step-by-step instructions on how to perform the job should be created so new employees can step right in without skipping a beat. Nothing is more frustrating to a new hire than winging it until they figure out their new job the hard way.
 
Delete or archive outdated material on the computer – Are there five versions of the same document on your computer – each with slight variations to them? Using outdated material can cause havoc internally and well as with customers. Be sure to archive or delete information that is no longer in use. It is also handy to use the “view header footer function” in your document to insert creation or revision dates on forms. This assures you are using the most current version of the document.
 
Standardized information, updated documents, and clearly defined job functions are key to a smooth running business. 


About Denise: 
Denise McGill is a freelance copywriter specializing in catalog product description, copy makeovers, web content, landing pages, promotional materials, articles and more. Visit her website at http://mcgillcopywriting.com for more information on giving your business the competitive edge.

 

New to SmallBizSurvival.com? Take the Guided Tour. Like what you see? Get our updates.

March 11, 2010 Filed Under: entrepreneurship, organization Tagged With: guest post

Wondering what is and is not allowed in the comments?
Or how to get a nifty photo beside your name?
Check our commenting policy.
Use your real name, not a business name.


Don't see the comment form?
Comments are automatically closed on older posts, but you can send me your comment via this contact form and I'll add it manually for you. Thanks!

Comments

  1. Lucy Beer says

    March 11, 2010 at 3:50 pm

    Love these ideas, especially the email templates and job function manuals. To extend the latter idea, one problem I see some small businesses having, particularly if they have employees/consultants that may not work in the same office, is an inadequate sharing of knowledge and information. Google docs can provide a decent solution to maintain central repositories of knowledge but I’ve noticed it requires a shift in thinking. People don’t automatically think to share the information they have or to consider whether it could be of value to someone else on the team. Do you have any other suggestions on ways teams can share knowledge or communicate more effectively amongst themselves?

  2. Lorilee Rager says

    March 11, 2010 at 4:00 pm

    These are such simple, easy tips & commonsense, but people don’t seem to follow them! Great post! Thank you!

  3. W^L+ says

    March 11, 2010 at 7:13 pm

    “Learn to use the software on your computer – Hours of productivity and time management can be lost in a day if you have employees that cannot adequately use the basic functions available on a spreadsheet or word document. Not knowing how to format or use basic formulas can have an employee laboring over a project needlessly and ultimately missing deadlines. If the budget is tight, have an internal employee teach the basics of the computer software your company uses – it is well worth the day spent to bring everyone up to speed.”

    A couple of comments there. My main job is on-site support. If you teach people how to use the current version of brand X wordprocessor, you’re not saving any time or money, because you’ll have to do it all over again in two years when the next version comes out and moves buttons and menus around. Training efforts should center around the general things that most wordprocessors, spreadsheets, etc have in common.

    This equips the user to figure out the specifics of a particular brand/version of software for himself/herself.

    Also: templates aren’t only for e-mail. Chances are, you have a few kinds of documents and spreadsheets that you use regularly. Instead of having people manually create them from scratch, create templates using styles instead of manual formatting, and then install the templates on each person’s computer. This will give your documents a professional look, without a lot of time tweaking formatting on each document. (Manual formatting is barbaric, like “bleeding” someone to stop a headache.)

  4. Innkeeper Seely says

    March 13, 2010 at 1:50 am

    The comments are as relevant as the post. I’m on page 40 of our Inn’s operating guide and I’m not sure how many more trees will die before it is done.

    For Lucy, if the team works on a project or event plan a follow up meeting the day after completion for rehash. Have a neutral person or tape player record comments both good and bad about how the process was handled, what could have gone better, what time line would be sensible if the event was repeated etc. This type of session gives you a template for planning and problem solving repeat projects or similar events.

  5. DeidraJow says

    April 6, 2010 at 2:47 am

    Hi Denise,

    I enjoyed your guest post on time savers. We can all use more time in our day! I thought I’d chime in with some resource links from Microsoft. They’re trying to tailor help to the small business community and they have a couple of tools / links below that might be worth checking out.

    Hope this helps!

    Deidra
    The Microsoft SMB Outreach Team
    v-dejow@microsoft.com
    Link:
    http://www.microsoft.com/smallbusiness/hub.mspx
    Microsoft Small Business Center
    http://www.pinpoint.microsoft.com/en-US/
    Microsoft Pinpoint tool to help you find technical experts and special applications

Howdy!

Glad you dropped in to the rural and small town business blog, established in 2006.

We want you to feel at home, so please take our guided tour.

Meet our authors on the About page.

Have something to say? You can give us a holler on the contact form.

If you would like permission to re-use an article you've read here, please make a Reprint Request.

Want to search our past articles? Catch up with the latest stories? Browse through the categories? All the good stuff is on the Front Page.

Shop Local

Buy local buttonReady to set up a shop local campaign in your small town? You'll need a guide who understands how we're different and what really works: Shop Local Campaigns for Small Towns.

Best of Small Biz Survival

What is holding us back? Why does every project take so long in small towns?

How any business can be part of downtown events by going mobile

Concert-goers talking and enjoying the evening in downtown Webster City, Iowa.

Why do people say there’s nothing to do here then not come to our concerts?

Retailers: Fill all empty space, floor to ceiling

More of the best of Small Biz Survival

Copyright © 2021 Becky McCray
Front Page · Log in