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Productivity is the key ingredient in any successful business. While it can be easy to shift focus to lead generation, sales conversion, profit margin or other metrics, profits always come back to productivity and efficiency. For no one is this truer than human resource firms. Consider the following steps as starting points toward improving productivity in your business and unlocking hidden profit potential:

  1. Build the right team. HR is all about building the right team for a business to accomplish its mission. While every day you help clients to perform this function, it is important not to forget to do the same thing in your own business. Recruiting, vetting, and securing the best team members is critical for the success of your company, so make sure to spend as much effort building your own team as you do for clients. Be sure not only to avoid candidates who are less qualified or knowledgeable, but also make an effort to identify early potentially toxic hires who can breed workplace in-fighting and poison office morale.
  2. Divide and conquer. In any business, it is important to nurture specialties. Technical knowledge related to certain aspects of a company’s operations allows certain people to perform tasks with higher levels of efficiency, accomplishing more in less time and making sure their respective areas are run well. You would not encourage clients to build an organization of generalists, so avoid doing so in your own business as well.

This also mean searching out and destroying redundancy. Of course, it is important to have multiple people engaged in sales or areas of operations, but it is also important for any business to avoid having multiple people performing overlapping functions. Often you can narrow employees’ focus or try to consolidate various functions in a single role, allowing other team members to redouble their efforts in other areas that may currently be ignored.

  1. Mind the mission. As counterintuitive as it may sound, to encourage productivity in any business it is important to separate your immediate focus as much as possible from the financial bottom line. Putting profit first can easily cause attention to shift away from attracting and serving clients, which is where it belongs. Instead, try to make profit a secondary or tertiary goal, instead keeping your business oriented toward serving clients the best you can. Believe firmly in the mission – this will drive sales – and focus on execution to maximize efficiency.
  2. Consolidate your focus. Many businesses sacrifice efficiency by trying to over-serve. They seem intent on being a one-stop-shop for clients, instead of providing a narrower but more skilled offering. Most businesses naturally revolve around a small set of core competencies which tend to drive the business as a whole. To maximize your efficiency, you need to take a big step back and identify the core competencies in your business, and make sure to refocus efforts around those areas. If you have a company that naturally works well with clients from certain fields, concentrate your efforts on becoming the best provider for firms in that field. You may have initiatives ongoing with the aim of build business in other areas, but bringing your focus back to your strengths can allow you to run your business efficiently and remove a lot of headaches.
  3. Check the figures. For help in any of these steps and to identify other opportunities to improve productivity in your business, be sure to conduct periodic, in-depth reviews of firm financials. Have figures broken down as much as possible into different revenue lines and aspects of operations. This will help you to compare the specific costs and benefits of each market segment that you serve, as well as analyze your own internal operations to look for inefficiencies.

The world of Human Resources is a great place for those who want to help clients assemble the ideal team for pursuing their respective missions. However, in helping clients to execute on their own strategies, it is important to periodically step back and work on your business. In order to put yourself in the best position to pursue your own vision, make sure you are taking the necessary steps toward increased productivity. Improving the efficiency of your business will enable you to best serve your clients and maximize the profit potential of your business.

 

Una Lawlor is Content Marketing Manager at Advance Systems, a company that provides world-class enterprise HR software. Una has over 10 years’ sales and marketing experience in retail, media, finance and technology. A graduate of Trinity College Dublin with a degree in English & French, Una has extensive content writing experience and specialises in the field of people operations and HR management. You can find Una on Twitter (@lawloru) and Linkedin.

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Tresha Moreland

Tresha Moreland is a 30-year organizational effectiveness and strategic workforce planning expert. She partners with business leaders to develop workplace strategies that achieve best-in-class results. She has held key organizational leadership roles in multiple industries such as manufacturing, distribution, retail, hospitality, and healthcare. Tresha is the founder and principal consultant of HR C-Suite, LLC (www.hrcsuite.com). HR C-Suite is a results-based HR strategy resource dedicated to connecting HR with business results. She has received a master’s degree in human resource management (MS) and a master’s degree in business administration (MBA). She has also earned a Senior Professional in Human Resources (SPHR), Six Sigma Black Belt Professional (SSBBP) Certification. She is also recognized as a Fellow with the American College Healthcare Executives with a FACHE designation.

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