A lot of people dream of owning their own business and being their own boss, and truthfully it can be incredibly rewarding. However, the practicalities of running a business are often eye-opening. One of the more tedious aspects of owning your own business is the administrative side of things. There is a lot of admin involved when running a business; the processes in place can be time-consuming and take you away from other aspects of the business where your time would be better spent. Read on to learn more.
Start by Assessing Current Administrative Practices
The first thing that you need to do is to take a step back and cast your eye over the current administrative processes. By assessing these processes and practices, you are likely to discover some areas of inefficiency that can be shored up. Some people find it helpful to refer back to notes; they observe the processes from beginning to end and then write down the workflow. Seeing it all on paper in front of you can help you to find steps that can be eliminated or streamlined in order to create more efficient administrative processes.
Do your best to prioritise during this process. It doesn’t make sense to begin with an administrative task that only needs to be carried out less regularly, or with a task that is of a low level of importance. Revising these processes isn’t going to save you as much time and money as the higher priority or more regular admin will, which is why you should start with those. Think about which administrative tasks play the most important role within the business or have the most influence within the business.
Lastly, if you want to reinvent these processes in their entirety to come up with more efficient ways of working, eliminate unnecessary time wastage and simply make things easier for all involved, it might make sense to start with the end results. Starting at the end with the desired outcomes gives you a place to work back from. If this is where you want to end up, what is the easiest, most efficient way to get there without losing any of the details or accuracy along the way? In some cases, this might mean digitising a process, changing filing techniques or even eliminating it altogether.
Always Take Employee Input on Board
Depending on the size of your business, the likelihood is that you either already do or you will have other people working with you, and the processes and practices that you come up with regarding admin are going to affect them too. It might even get to the point where these tasks are no longer on your daily to-do list at all but someone else entirely. This is why it makes sense to do your best to collaborate on the creation and refinement of these administrative tasks. The employees might even have their own suggestions which you would never have thought of otherwise.
As the owner, you, of course, retain the ultimate power over these tasks, but it is definitely worth asking for input. In some instances, whether developing administrative tasks or looking at other areas of the business, outsourcing and working with an outside consulting company can help to yield insights and results that you would not experience otherwise. For example, 1ovmany’s OKR or objective and key results service can help to create, refine and successfully implement key strategies.
Creating, Implementing & Reviewing
Once the processes have been created and thought out, it becomes time to implement them. The implementation process does largely depend on the process itself. In today’s society, it makes sense to look for ways to streamline your administrative processes, and this often means looking for ways to automate them. This helps to lessen the need for human intervention and oversight, which frees up personnel for other, more pressing matters. Finding the best programmes, applications, and tools are going to rely on research.
Once the new systems are in place and have been used for a while, you should take the time to review them and measure their efficacy. You need to ensure that they have done their job in terms of making life easier for employees and also assess whether or not they are fit for purpose. Have they actually managed to protect the resources of the business? If they have, then they might not need to be refined any further, but annual reviews certainly make sense as technology is constantly changing, which means so are the best business practices. If you find that they are lacking in one way or another, then they will need to be refined again until you find the best possible methods.
The Bottom Line
Administrative tasks can be incredibly boring, especially when running a small business because most of them tend to fall into your lap. Arguably, there are other areas within the business where your time would be better spent. This is why developing the best processes and workflows is so important; it also allows other people to be able to step in and perform these tasks without variation on the results produced.
