Admin is a necessary but demanding part of every business. There’s not a single industry in the work that doesn’t require admin work. It’s what keeps businesses moving.
Thankfully, there are ways to reduce the time spent on this work. Read on to discover how to stop admin from being a massive waste of your company’s time.
Plan your day in the morning
Admin can be a whirlpool kind of task. Once you start, the details and minutiae suck you in and you end up spending far longer than you originally planned on it.
Before you start doing any actual work, plan your day. Create a to-do list for every task you have to do — including admin — and allocate a specific amount of time for each.
This helps you delineate your day and prevent you from losing yourself in admin. In the same way, it also lets you focus on more important tasks, be more productive, delivers better results and reduces the likelihood of errors which might generate more admin.
Use tech streamline your day
As technology becomes more advanced, it offers businesses greater functionality and flexibility. It makes otherwise arduous, time-consuming tasks swift, easy, and automated.
Take payroll, for instance. Coordinating and calculating pay for each member of your team manually is a necessary but time-consuming task.
But with payroll software, you can easily calculate your employee’s logged hours and pay them, on time and with the correct rate of tax applied. This saves you a huge amount of time overall.
Fuel cards are another good example of this. These cards let businesses track spending on fuel, make it easy for employees to pay at gas stations, and even offer savings on fuel purchases across the board.
These are widely available, but for those businesses operating in Europe, iCompario favors the EDC fuel card. By tracking your business’ fuel expenditure digitally, you can quickly and easily calculate costs and forecasts for your fleet of cars.
Create processes and document them
One of the biggest causes of wasteful admin is a lack of defined and documented processes. Everyone has their own way of doing things, but in business, this can mean crossed wires, wasted time, and far more admin.
Create a strict, clearly-defined process for each task and document it step-by-step in an SOP (standard operating procedure). Make this document easily accessible by everyone who needs to view it.
It’s also important to ensure new starters are aware of these SOPs. Often, employees who have been there a while assume that new staff know the same things that they do. This assumed knowledge means that processes get neglected and admin time increases.
Consequently, it’s important to make SOPs an important part of the onboarding process.
Employ an admin assistant
Virtually every job role in a business requires some degree of admin work. Whether you’re an HR professional, a sales operative, or a CEO, you will be required to conduct some administrative tasks.
Naturally, these tasks can rack up, especially during busy periods. As a result, you end up spending more time on admin and less time on the task you were actually employed to do.
Consequently, it might be worth considering hiring an admin assistant. When you employ a dedicated individual solely for the purpose of admin, you give yourself more time to focus on other tasks that keep the business moving.
Simply delegate any admin task to your company assistant, and they can sort the little details for you.
The tips above will help you streamline your day and reduce the time spent on administrative work. Not all of them will apply, but they give you the direction you need to start saving time and increasing productivity as a result.