Tasha A business can thrive when all employees are spending their time on value-adding tasks that help to push the brand forward. Alas, that’s not always possible. In fact, given the amount of time that routine admin tasks take to complete, it often seems impossible.
Repetitive, time-consuming business admin tasks don’t just take up time that would be better spent elsewhere; they can also sap a team’s energy and morale. People want to spend their time doing work they’re passionate about, not answering emails.
The good news is that it’s nearly always possible to reclaim the time lost through repetitive business tasks. The main issue is knowing which tasks are silently throttling your team’s productivity. We’ve put together a few of the most common culprits, as well as outlining some handy solutions.
Marketing
Digital marketing is increasingly complex, and while it’s possible for in-house employees to put together campaigns, putting together effective campaigns is often beyond them. Many employees spend a lot of time and money creating digital marketing strategies, only to achieve below-average results. If your brand could benefit from solid digital marketing, then it’s usually best to just hand the job over to an agency instead. That’ll not only free up your employees’ time, but should also offer a much better ROI.
Payroll
Payroll is often time-consuming for two reasons. The first is that businesses are still using manual payroll processes, which makes everything longer. The second is that it’s an admin task where errors have consequences. That means that employees have to take even more time to ensure that everything is data. Despite that, manual payroll processes are still highly error-prone.
Given the impact that payroll can have on time and employee reputation, it’s generally recommended for businesses to use cloud payroll software rather than trying to do everything manually. This software also offers a range of other benefits beyond cutting down on time/errors, including empowering employees with self-service access to their important documents, payroll integrations, and simplified compliance.
Answering Common Questions
Your customers will have questions, but what you’ll often find is that your team is really dealing with a few questions that are being asked over and over again. Probably a handful of questions could account for 80%+ of the questions your customers ask.
Putting together a comprehensive FAQ section on your website can help to save your team’s time. Another option is to add an AI-driven live chat feature to your website that can answer basic questions about your business. Customers should still be able to reach a real human worker if needed, but in many cases, they’ll find that the FAQ and live chat are enough to get the answers they need.
Searching for Information
Employees can spend a long time looking for the information they need, and completely unnecessarily so. It usually happens because important documents are scattered among different systems. Putting together a business knowledge base that stores everything your employees might need, from documents to resources, can go a long way to saving your employees’ time.
