As a Tradie focused on acquiring an effective scheme of management to improve business operations, what course of action would help you best in streamlining your business? The goal of improving business management for any trade or contractual business is to increase productivity. However, as businesses turn to technology, productivity isn’t limited anymore to just a ratio of input and output. It means smarter use of resources at your disposal. Maintaining a workplace may be hard but here are 5 ways tradies can improve business operations and management
1. Improve your communication
Even though technology may be the primary agent in business productivity, it is communication that is even more crucial to any business. Ineffective communication irrespective of your technology will impede your business. For tradies with teams working on location especially, communication is necessary to keep track of work progress and productivity. Constant updates allow you to make effective decisions and resolve immediate problems if any. Job reports and work progress reaching you after a few hours means a waste of precious time and the inability to move forward.
Regardless of how small or large a trade, effective communication helps employees understand the hierarchy of a business and the primary voice in charge for activating a decision.
2. Make your site managers proactive
Gone are the days of the laid back site overseer. Proactive managers in sync with a project team will always be a motivating factor to improve work efficiency. It contributes towards a more amicable and responsive relationship between team members. Managers also involved in daily operations can do much to help you focus on important issues of the business. Ensure your managers involve themselves in decision making, business innovation and discussions with you that help to cultivate stronger ideas of operational improvement and efficiency.
3. Use technology efficiently for improving daily operations
Technology of course is the big daddy of any company resource. Industry now is heavily dependent on technology and there is no reason why you shouldn’t too. There are superb technological tools by which tradies can improve daily operations and job management. Business oriented software eliminates the need of several mundane and redundant processes used in conventional operations management.
For tradies engaged in plumbing for example, using a comprehensive operations and management software to streamline your entire work process makes good business sense. From daily operations to job tracking and accounting, the right software tools help you clinch control of your entire business and puts you not just in the driver’s seat but gives you a 360 view of your entire set up.
4. Post-mortem of business
While a mandatory practice in large companies, tradies never really give such procedures a thought. Given the fact that your allotted project has been completed for the day and your staff are already engrossed in discussions on the next one.
Get your entire team together for a chat because good project management requires a daily a post mortem of the business. Indulge in an analysis of the entire routine to identify areas that are potential impediments to a job. Discuss with your workforce even the nitty gritties of a job where discussing what went well and what did not can help overcome such problems in future. Identifying and overcoming obstacles can help you overcome them for successful project management.
5. Divide large projects into small steps
When you’ve acquired larger projects, it can increase daily operational workflow. Never make the mistake of following the same old business plan of allotting the job to one particular team. Divide the projects into levels that can be tackled according to the hierarchy of your human resources. Dividing the work into smaller levels creates an effective and smoother navigation of the operational landscape. In fact, this is an ideal way to maintain employee motivation by reducing the workload on one particular set of workers which will definitely result in improved productivity.
Dividing work helps you gain better insight into the project where you can monitor each and every department of work smoothly. Communication again comes into play here where every department perfectly synchronized to a main project improves efficiency. Moreover by divisive methods of operations, you can keep easily focus on the strengths and weakness of day to day operations to chalk out better ways of handling tasks.
6. Put pressure on the business not the people
When it boils down to effective business management, several tradies make the mistake of piling up the pressure on their employees. Perhaps in a large organization this could make sense but as a contract business and trade, it might turn counterproductive. Freeing people from tasks to utilize their resources for pressing issues of your operations and management will actually benefit you in the long run. It also creates a genuine impression on an employee in terms of recognizing values and performances. Placing a bigger responsibility on employees bogged down by low level tasks can actually be a great motivating factor in improving efficiency and business operations.
