A Handy Guide To Managing Your Workspace Effectively

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Whether your startup company is in its early days or has been running for a while, it is important to stay organized to maximize efficiency, for yourself and your staff. From organizing your workspace, managing your team, and ensuring time is well spent, there are ways you can make your business more productive while reducing your stress as you try and hold everything together.

Consider the following ways to help manage your startup and ensure its efficiency.

Organize your workspace

There is an old saying, a tidy house is a tidy mind, which makes perfect sense in the workplace. To be able to focus and perform your duties efficiently, you need to get rid of anything you don’t need and have at hand those things you do. For example, take a look at your desk space. Remove any scraps of paper, used coffee cups and stale sandwiches from your desk to make it look clean and ready for use.

There is another famous saying, a place for everything and everything in its place. Whatever loose items you have lying around, from pens to paper clips, have separate pots to put them in.

Go through your filing cabinets and get rid of any out of date or useless paperwork. If something is important, scan it and save to your computer. If something isn’t important, shred it! If you do need paperwork at hand, then have a desk tray or a labeled drawer for it. In these environmentally conscious times, we all need to do our bit, so if you can work electronically, the trees, if they could talk, would surely thank you for it.

Chances are your computer screen may need cleaning up too. Gone are the days when you need to save every file to your hard drive. Cloud services such as Google Drive and Dropbox means you can easily upload and save your work without the need to have multitudes of folders littered across your computer screen.

Another area to tidy up is your email inbox. Delete anything that is irrelevant and partition valuable emails into separate folders, such as client accounts or project ideas.

It is good practice at the end of every working day, no matter how tired you may be, to have a tidy up of everything mentioned above. Returning the next day to a clean working environment will do wonders for your mental state.

Team Management

No longer do you need to be in the same building as your team as it is possible for each of you to work at home or on the go. This can cut down on office expenses and room hiring bills, and may even add to the productivity of your workforce if they can work in comfort and with their personal equipment.

With the use of cloud services, it is possible to collaborate on documents you or your team members have uploaded. Whether working on a computer, tablet or smartphone, there is the opportunity to share and edit pieces of work. You can also communicate directly on the cloud by making notes on the document, cutting down the need to make expensive phone calls.

Your team needs to feel included in some of the company decisions. You may be the boss, but that doesn’t mean you know everything. Whether you meet face to face with your team or use a video conferencing service on something like Skype, make time to share ideas across the team. By brainstorming project ideas and listening to their ideas, your staff will truly feel part of the business you are developing.

It is important to utilize your team effectively, so get to know them and understand their strengths and weaknesses. It is no good asking somebody to design a web page when they are more skilled at writing content. However, if you need them to complete work out of their comfort zone then teach them new skills or organize training to aid their development.

Another effective way to manage a team is to hold meetings, daily if not weekly. This way you can delegate tasks to each and ensure everybody has work to do. Free online software, such as Trello, will enable you to allocate a daily schedule for each member of the team and keep everybody up to date on what each other is up to.

A happy team is a productive one.

Sorting your finances

Unless you have a member of staff who is a whizzkid at money matters, you may have to sort out business accounts yourself. Whether it’s sorting staff wages, recording expenses or invoicing clients, it can be stressful and confusing if numbers are not your forte. By using a special smartphone app, the process can be simplified for you. With a couple of button presses, you can send billing reminders to clients, send professional looking invoices and calculate your expenses on the go.

Use your time wisely

Gone are the days when you need to scribble down appointment times or notes on pieces of paper and pin them to a noticeboard. Using calendar booking software, you can keep tabs on your schedule and that of your team on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. Whether it’s keeping note of important appointments, booking a room, or allocating daily tasks, the information you need will be at your fingertips.

Effective time management is crucial, as some tasks will be more important and pressing than others. Make a list each day, with the most important things you need to do on top. Many of us have a habit of procrastinating on something because it appears stressful. By not doing it, however, you will likely become more stressed as it will always be there in the back of your mind. So confront it head on, whether it’s having a conversation with somebody you are struggling with or dealing with the accounts, get it done and reward yourself for it afterward.

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