A few years ago, I was preparing for a key meeting. The presentation folder and important notes had been swallowed up in the general chaos. That meeting went as well as you probably think it did! I did not go well at all. From that point on, I knew something had to change about the way I organised my business.
Organisational mastery became not just a mantra, but a way of increasing business efficiency to make sure I did everything by the deadline. It meant I did not miss business opportunities through being disorganised.
In this article, I will share with you what I have done since that point to organise my business and manage the time I have during my working day. This isn’t just an article about which are the best To-Do apps on the market, or how to arrange lists. This is a list of the strategies that I use day-in, day-out to make my business run as well as it does. From putting together a killer management strategy to using some intuitive digital tools to ensure clear on-team communication, we’re going to see exactly what it takes to reach operational excellence in your (potential) startup.
Understanding Business Efficiency
Business efficiency is how well an organisation can deliver a product or service based on the total cost and the speed at which it reaches that total cost. Or, in other words, how well a business manages resources, including people, time, and processes, in order to produce a product or service.
Preserving and understanding business efficiency is probably one of the most important things for any company to keep if it wants to:
• stay competitive in a given market
• have the most responsive approach to servicing their customers
• ensure its overall sustainability in business into the future
And business and process efficiency is fundamental if you want to increase your productivity in business. Increasing productivity is the only real way to protect profitability for your business and the people that that business serves. Outside of a business charging a higher price for its product, it has no real way of increasing profitability if it can’t ratchet up productivity. It has to be able to do more with the same amount or fewer resources. This is also all about the elimination of waste.
Key Management Strategies for Organisational Mastery
Streamlining processes can be the key to unlocking operational excellence. I have seen how it’s a game-changer for how teams work; identifying and eradicating these negative issues from their workflow helped them work more efficiently. If you are a solopreneur, think about how this could be advantageous to you. One thing I have seen work very well is process mapping. This visually represents your workflow and how you operate. It gives you a bird’s-eye view of the operation and can help you spot unnecessary hold-ups. From there, you can get your operations down to a fine, well-oiled process that leaves no room for hold-ups and builds up a culture of continuous improvement.
Another effective strategy for achieving operational excellence can be to get technical. There are a lot of amazing tools, tips, and tricks out there to help anyone become a better person and accomplish more in their day. But what about the tools and software you and or your team can use to achieve more? Increasingly more teams are using project management software like Asana and Trello to plan their work and manage tasks.
They are used in daily operations, stand-up Scrum meetings, and Kanban-style projects to work out what has been done, what needs to be done, what hasn’t been done – and to create a culture of accountability. Lots of these tools have very helpful, visual management features that give great management solutions. For example, the ones on Asana or Trello go some way to helping you understand how much of the project has been completed and when and where progress is being made, which could help towards reducing Lead Time.
The above isn’t necessarily all that operational excellence is. The trained eye will be fixated on the processes before and after the present one, making sure that all the parts slot together like cogs smoothly and efficiently. That keeps the workflow process at a good rhythm.
Effective Time Management Techniques
In the broader conversation about how to be more efficient in business, the subject of better time management takes center stage.
At the higher level are priority and delegation. If you can find what is often noted as important but not urgent, you—and your team—can concentrate on those areas where skills and passion intersect and where you can get big results. Delegation both upward (if you’re in a position too) to superiors and downward can ensure that you are personally freed up for more value-added and “future-focused” work. As solopreneurs, we often hire social media managers, VAs, bookkeepers, etc; delegating these jobs will leave you to do what you do best!
Scheduling time is the next important point. Having the luxury of having another business where we do not face clients has given structure to my day. It has transformed my professional activities because I know that I have only certain hours set aside for my “day job” at a collections law firm. Set tasks have to be done in those hours. There isn’t always (read: almost never) time for someone outside of the firm poking in. This forced focus means no endless and pointless back-and-forth between focused work and communication. You also will not be left multitasking. You can plan to eat your frogs at the time you usually are at your best.
To start, write down your day’s activities. Classify them by the four quadrants Stephen Covey suggested in his famous time management matrix (urgent and important, important but not urgent, urgent but not important, and not urgent and not important). Then, based on what you see, block time—then change tasks when you “run out of time” in the original allocation you set for “like” work. Make sure that you include breaks where you can and do “clear” your head to get the much-needed adjunct to your work—critical wellness/mindfulness/self-care so you can get in the “quality” of your activities (don’t be like this guy).
Know that people are most efficient when they work to outcomes. Scope your work to do your focused work to a likely ending point.
Cultivating a Culture of Efficiency
Employee engagement and empowerment equal rope. Give employees a role in a decision, and they are naturally likely to take more responsibility for its outcome. This is the intuitive thing that good managers and business owners know. You don’t get full accountability from a team unless every single member of your organisation feels invested in driving the kind of success—efficiency, sales, innovation, customer care, etc.—that they believe the team can achieve.
Good, old-fashioned, actionable feedback and recognition during team-wide campaigns and at every opportunity for managers in one-to-ones is crucial. The fact is, this process should drive your journey towards further ensuring the culture you have in place is one of continuous improvement.
Replacing bad practices in the ways your team serves your customers so that they can get back to you in the future, tuning ‘medium opportunity’ into ‘strong opportunity,’ and small deals into bigger, faster deals is just smart.
Professional problem-solvers should evaluate this as scrappy work that their organisation can develop over time to be more innovative. At the very least, I see us developing the will and the skills to reverse engineer, sometimes in an ad hoc way in terms of a timetable and additional operations that secure new sales.
Final Thoughts
Achieving organisational mastery is all about business efficiency. It is the way your business can get rid of useless redundancy, encourage team collaboration, and be ready to change with the market. It is the methodology that not only provides employees with a likely boost in corporate productivity but also (hopefully) a jump in employee pleasure and the fun they have at work.
Remember, these are generally not part-and-parcel attributes of an organisation and its internal operations but are instead carefully and painstakingly included via the adoption and implementation of specific tools, workflows (like a daily scrum, maybe), and education.
So, I encourage you to put into effect at least one in this list (even in the comments – we can create a community of learners out of this!). Maybe get a good project management tool. Maybe revamp how you do (or start doing) team meetings. Or maybe get a company like Pluralsight in to do a DevOps assessment at your company. Just try something and take that first step to improvement today.
I have mentioned it a couple of times, but it is worth mentioning again: Do not stop improving. Keep trying new things. Do not see this as a weakness, but as a great strength.
Jodie Seamons 
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