When owners and top managers think about optimizing business processes in a company, all attention is directed to production units. What are the signs to understand that there are problems in the office and they need to be solved?
Where do the costs come from?
Any company goes through three stages – growth, stability and stagnation. During a period of growth, when a business is rapidly rising to the level of medium or even large, its owners do not care much about the associated costs. Sales volumes are growing, market positions are strengthening. Profit figures are encouraging and allow us to increase our turnover even more. Usually in such conditions, business leaders do not have time to ask questions about reducing inefficient production costs, improving work processes and increasing labor productivity.
Digital solutions to help you manage your office
In the process of developing standards, a large amount of data is created that needs to be structured. For this, the workforce optimisation system is used in production.
There are also digital solutions for managing the back office — with the help of such platforms, you can record and analyze the workload of each office employee.
By implementing such a digital platform, the company will receive several benefits at once:
- on the basis of objective data, determine the actual amount of work performed by support units;
- will be able to balance the load between the employees of the unit;
- calculate the cost of performing operations requiring different qualifications;
- improve the pay system so that back office employees are motivated to work harder and better.
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How to measure the effectiveness of an office worker on your own?
Rising costs for non-production personnel and reduced manageability are the most obvious problems that arise in the back office (accounting, legal and IT departments, human resources, security, etc.). The tools that are already used in the work of departments directly involved in production, such as labor rationing and the digitization of work processes, help to solve these problems.
The efficiency of key departments is expressed in terms of output, revenue, shipments, and the performance of their employees is measured using standards. The size of the salary of each employee depends on the fulfillment of the standards and the complexity of the tasks to be solved. If all indicators of the remuneration system are linked correctly, employees are interested in improving their skills and quickly completing tasks. In this case, the owners and top managers of the company will see that the workload of departments is growing faster than the staff.
The standards also help improve the work of back office employees. Although many of them are sure that their work is too “creative” to be rationed. In reality, 90% of the operations in the office are standard, and most of them are the simplest (atomic) operations. If you isolate these atomic operations from business processes and calculate the time for their execution, you can get the standards by which the efficiency of office employees is measured.
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