Never before have there been so many business opportunities. The number of niche industries keeps growing seemingly by the minute. This is all nice and great if you want to start a new business, but things get a bit more difficult when it comes to actually keep your company up and running. That’s because the more opportunities there are – the greater the competition.
Standing out from the pack takes a lot of creativity, innovation, and dedication, but a huge part of it is also how you optimize the work. The processes you can work on optimizing can range from delegating important and urgent projects to appropriate teams to small repetitive tasks like taking attendance.
If you’re wondering what the best and easiest way to do this is, take a look around you. Wherever you are, chances are you are surrounded by technology. And there lies your answer.
In this article, we’re going to explore how you can use employee monitoring to optimize your business processes. There are many different types of employee monitoring, but what you can use for this particular purpose is employee tracking software. How effectively you identify the processes that can be improved and to what extent you optimize and automate them can make all the difference for your company on the competitive market.
But first, why bother?
The necessity for process optimization and automation is probably clear and even intuitively logical for most managers and executives. It all has to do with saving time and money.
Efficiency should be your ultimate goal when it comes to business processes. You should aim to be as fast as possible, while, at the same time, you shouldn’t lose sight of quality either. This might sound pretty hard at first, but it’s really all about using the right tools.
If you manage to achieve optimum efficiency, it will allow you to free up resources, including time, money and manpower, for other tasks. For instance, let’s say that you have figured out how to best delegate different parts of a project among team members in a way that they are faster and the end result is better (we’ll talk about how you can do this in a bit). Now, besides improving the quality of work, you also have a certain amount of time left for other processes.
You can see how this can quickly snowball – saving time on one project will let you use it on another one, then you’ll finish that other project faster too, and so on and so forth. And imagine what you can do with the extra time in case you don’t want to transfer your team to another project right away (think additional training, research, professional development, just to name a few options).
Therefore, optimizing business processes should be your number one priority when you start thinking about company organization.
Now let’s see how you can go about doing it.
Identifying the Processes
First things first, you have to know which business processes you should be working on optimizing and in what ways. There’s no one definitive answer, it will vary from one business to another. For one company, it could be making the production more automated, whereas for another it might be something like having more timely customer support.
This is where your employee monitoring software comes in. Process monitoring can be essential is giving you some guidelines on what you can improve.
So, how does computer tracking software work? Well, basically, it gives you information on what your employees are doing at any time during their working hours. This includes which programs they’re using, which websites they are visiting and how much time they’re spending there.
You can use this data to see which processes are taking the longest amount of time, which employees are falling behind when it comes to using certain apps, or you can check to see if there are any minor repetitive processes that you can maybe try to automate.
Software for employee monitoring can give you so much data you can work with. Use it to pinpoint weaknesses and areas for improvement. Employee tracking software won’t magically make all your employees faster, but it can definitely provide some actionable insights and help you make informed decisions.
Optimizing Task Delegation
One major benefit of having computer use tracking software in place is that it allows you to plan how to best optimize task delegation. Knowing which team or employee will complete a certain process most efficiently is an invaluable insight.
We mentioned the ability of employee tracking software to monitor how much time your employees are spending on different tasks. Now, imagine you know that employee A takes on average about 10 minutes less creating invoices that anybody else. While that doesn’t mean that you should give him every invoice there is, you can delegate a few urgent invoices to him knowing that he’ll most likely finish the task on time.
Alternatively, if you see that employee B spends 15 minutes more working in Excel that other employees do for the same task, you can decide to invest a little time to give him some additional training. This will make the process faster in the long run.
Employee tracking software can also aggregate this data on a team level, which gives you a bigger picture or how efficient different teams and departments are so you can improve their productivity.
Employee Monitoring and Process Automation
Finally, good computer monitoring software will also help you automate some of the processes along the way.
At the very least, employee monitoring tools can track attendance and overtime for you. You can have clear comprehensive data on everyone’s clock-in times, how long they spent at work, how much overtime you need to pay them, and, if you’re working with clients, employee tracking software can count your billable hours.
These are all basic little things that will save a lot of time and prevent human error, but there’s also automated time tracking software integrated within some systems. It lets you track different projects based on the file names. This can give you an additional layer of data pertaining to project efficiency, with the benefit of you not having to do a thing.
Conclusion
The benefits of optimizing your business processes should be more than clear by now, but knowing how to do it is what’s going to make you or break you. We’ve discussed how you can use data from employee tracking software to identify and optimize the processes that will make your employees more productive and efficient. Now it’s up to you to explore the possibilities and make smart decisions which will take your company to the next level.
