As you seek to optimize the efficiency of your company, the first steps are to understand how things function currently. This can help you identify those areas that need improvement and strategy moving forward.
The ideal first step in understanding your organization is to conduct a couple of workflow measurement studies in your workplace: a time and motion study.
Here are 5 of the ways that taking these steps can benefit your company:
1. Understand your company’s weaknesses and turn them into strengths.
Any waste that the operation of your organization might contain cannot be addressed until it is understood. By understanding the time usage as well as the physical mechanisms within the operations of your company, you can target any areas of waste or inefficiency, and turn these areas of weakness into new areas of strength.
2. Help out your budget without having to cut personnel.
If your company is facing financial struggles or downsizing, the answer may not be in reducing, but in maximizing the resources you already have. By making minor adjustments to workflow, work standards, and the physical layout of your organization and operations, you will be able to increase productivity and profits in ways that may surprise you.
3. Set clear and fair labor standards for your workers.
By gaining a clear understanding of the productivity of your employees and their time usage, as well as any other workspace factors that may be obstacles to their productivity, you will be able to determine more accurately what reasonable expectations and standards for your employees’ work should be. Accurate work standards, procedures, and expectations will be a benefit to both your organization and your employees, as it will give them clear and fair goals to work towards.
4. Increase morale by making your employees’ jobs as simple and straightforward as possible.
Increasing efficiency and reducing roadblocks for your employees will be very beneficial to them. The results of a time study, for instance, may provide you with an understanding that your current workspace and layout of that space is inefficient and inconvenient to many of your employees, who have to go further out of their way than needed to accomplish their work. Reducing these inefficiencies will, quite simply, make your employees’ jobs easier, enabling their hard work to yield more immediate results. A time and motion study will help you to avoid wasting your employees’ time and will enable them to do their jobs to the best of their own potential.
5. Keep your workspace “lean.”
A time study analysis will help you to eliminate those things which do not serve the purposes of your company, and instead only hinder its work — whether that’s a poorly-designed floor layout causing unnecessary travel within the space, or an overly complex process within your organization that could be simplified. By identifying these areas of waste, you can hone down the core strength of your organization. A lean organization is a strong organization, that can truly reach its potential.
