A successful small or medium enterprise (SME) or startup planning to transition to remote working must decide on a solid plan and employ hardworking and smart people to implement processes to achieve specific goals. Productivity in the workplace depends on how effectively they’ve done to reach their goals.
By hiring a Magic virtual assistant to help you along the way, you can maximize business productivity sooner rather than later.
The business productivity of any business that is thinking of transitioning to remote work can increase when you hire people suited to this environment such as a Magic virtual assistant. First, they can assist in finding ways to boost workforce productivity. Second, they can monitor processes to spot productivity problems at the onset. Lastly, they can provide possible solutions to the problems as soon as they occur.
What Is Business Productivity?
Business productivity is the output of a startup or SME, employee, or team compared to the resources used to complete the task. Measuring its success requires analyzing data, evaluating the processes, and employee performance. So, say that your sales productivity is to increase your monthly sales by 10% monthly after the first quarter of the year, achieving a 12% increase at the start of the second quarter means you’ve hit it and beyond. Evaluate the processes to determine where you skyrocketed and where it flatlined so you can improve your strategies and repeat the success.
An experienced Magic virtual assistant can help you choose the right strategies to employ. Also, they can help you determine problems affecting your productivity at the onset and recommend the best solutions to these problems.
Productivity Problems in the Workplace — and Their Fixes
Productivity can go down quickly if there are no solutions in place to solve possible problems that can occur during the processes. Discover some common productivity problems that the manager or business owner may be doing wrong and the most effective solutions they can apply to resolve the problems. With these, your VA will know what solution to apply as soon as they notice these problems happen, thus, contributing to better productivity.
Unclear Direction
It’s great to let your team have some level of autonomy. However, a team with vague direction is bound to delay accomplishing tasks. Plus, they won’t know what tasks to prioritize.
Fix: Give definite and clear guidance to your team members by communicating objectives and goals regularly. The set objectives give your Magic virtual assistant the goal to target in order to hit their business productivity.
Poor Work-Life balance
Working for longer than 40 hours a week can encroach on someone’s personal life, leading to burnout. Burnout leads to fatigue and inattention, which can drastically reduce productivity. Worse still, burned-out employees may simply quit— leaving the business with major gaps to fill.
Fix: Decide on collaboration tools that can help your virtual assistant automate recurring tasks and conduct better communication. These small things can reduce their workload, averting the risk of overtime and overwork.
Unrealistic Expectations
You’ve shared your goals and expectations with your Magic virtual assistant. Seeing an unattainable output you expect them to accomplish in a short period of time increases work-related stress and discourages productivity.
Fix: It’s normal for your VA not to communicate with you about these insurmountable expectations you’ve set. They won’t want to appear inefficient. So, it’s your job to ensure that you’ve assigned manageable workloads. Communication is key to knowing what tasks should be adjusted. Encourage your team to be open with you regarding bottlenecks so both of you can find a solution. Make sure the tasks are within your VA’s power to accomplish so business productivity will increase.
Zero Feedback
You’ve set target goals but don’t inform your team of their performance feedback. This won’t let them know which areas they need to improve on. It will not help them find ways to improve or fix shortcomings. After all, you gave no feedback.
Fix: Regularly giving constructive criticism is important in any business. Don’t wait until the performance review. After each assignment (or during regular intervals), let people know how they did and work with them to identify obstacles. Prompt feedback goes a long way to increase workplace productivity and efficiency. Plus, this can be seen as a supportive work environment where your VAs can get motivated to do better.
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Five Strategies Magic Offers For Business Productivity
Aside from learning possible productivity problems and their fixes, discover strategies that you can use for your business goals. Check out these five strategies you can use to boost productivity in the workplace.
1. Review Goals Regularly
Establish the goals clearly with your Magic virtual assistant and monitor their progress. This way, you can evaluate if they are appropriate for the actual status at each process phase. You and your VA should be able to spot misguided or ineffective processes and make the necessary changes if you monitor them regularly.
2. Minimize Time-Consuming Activities
Whether you’re working in the office or at home, many things can distract you from focusing on work. Here are the top three productivity killers you should avoid, especially when you transition to remote working.
- Meetings: Conduct meetings only whenever necessary. Make sure to limit the duration and the attendees. This way, you can keep a clear agenda and focus on achieving resolutions. Target 15 to 30 minutes as your team is also busy with other tasks.
- Lack of organization: Team members will waste time and effort going around just to know who they should report to and when. A productivity system helps you organize your digital workflows and processes. If your team knows what to do, who to ask for approval after project completion, etc., your business should run smoothly.
- Coworkers: It’s good to build a good rapport with other team members. However, there’s a proper balance between work and personal conversations. Some light banter makes work more bearable, but the focus during office hours should remain on work.
3. Motivate Your Team
Motivation helps you persevere despite hardships and challenges. However challenging or numerous tasks assigned to your Magic virtual assistant are, motivation will keep them going. Know what motivates your team members so you know how to encourage them, especially when they’re feeling discouraged at work.
Have a good balance between extrinsic and intrinsic motivation. The first gives external rewards for good performance while the other encourages self-reflective benefits that push a person to succeed. So, provide company-sponsored team-building activities as an extrinsic motivator. An intrinsic motivator depends on each individual – like when an employee participates in the sports games during the team building you sponsored just because it’s fun and not because of the reward winning can give.
4. Avoid Multitasking
Many team members are great multitaskers. However, it is still better to focus on one task and finish it before moving on to the next. Stop multitasking to increase your productivity by 40%. As business owners, make sure you assign equal workloads to your team members. Don’t pile work on team members who can do their work faster to encourage them to slow down (and avoid burnout). Meanwhile, give chances to those who want to give it a go as well. Set realistic goals to eliminate juggling tasks all at once.
5. Use Productivity Tools
Take advantage of technology by using effective collaboration tools and business messaging applications for business productivity boosts. Check out Magic’s fifteen collaboration tool picks and choose the most suitable one for your business. Moreover, they can help you decide on a suitable productivity system to use for your business.
Magic Collaboration Tools to Boost Productivity
Magic prides itself on finding the most suitable virtual assistants for SMEs, startups, and other businesses. We make sure that you and your Magic virtual assistant can start work anytime you need things done. Thus, our project management tool lets you manage your team of virtual assistants in one place. Aside from the client portal, Magic chose these fifteen integration tools to boost productivity within your virtual workplace. They’re specially chosen to let you do remote work management effectively and even on the go.
With your preferred tools combined with an effective productivity system, you and your team of Magic virtual assistants can increase productivity and maximize your business potential.
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