As I write this article, the dog days of summer are upon us. Generally, this is the time of year when business owners and their teams can take a much-needed break. A break can mean different things — personal time and/or business reflection time.
Personal time is pretty simple — it’s doing something you enjoy. It could be spending time at a lakeside cottage, catching a movie at an outdoor drive-in, hiking and biking along one of Ontario’s fabulous trail systems, reading a book, or listening to a podcast under a tree in a local park. These simple pleasures can be enjoyed on your own, or with family and friends. Personal time is to re-energize and should be part of your wellness plan.
August and September are also good times for business reflection — looking back over the season in order to meet the fall and winter with a renewed outlook and to increase productivity. Asking the hard questions: how can we increase productivity without burning out our staff? How can we make our businesses more efficient with the team members we have? What new efficiencies are we keen to implement? How can we encourage our teams to work smarter? Have we asked staff to suggest solutions?
CBC business columnist Don Pittis recently wrote: “…boosting productivity should be understood as increasing outputs without increasing inputs. The idea is to do things in a more efficient way, buying or inventing cheaper machines to help with the job, or creating procedures that require fewer laborious steps… It can be the machines becoming more productive through technology. It can also be the workers becoming more productive through more education or enhancing their skills.”
What are you doing to help your business become efficient in order to increase productivity? Are you still relying on only manual labour to install driveway pavers or are you utilizing a prolifter or a large-scale vacuum lift? To move soil to a new backyard garden, are your crews hoofing it with individual bags or are you using a dingo loader with interchangeable attachments? Are you still guessing on the weather and moving your crews around in case of rain or snow rather than relying on strong meteorology/climatology technology such as the KSMI software?
Whether you operate a large-scale business or a small two-person business, efficiencies are an important consideration and they ultimately relieve staff stress, leading to a happier workplace. It also improves your bottom line.
As always, I welcome your questions and opportunities for further discussion. Please reach me by email. Cheers.
