Taking smalls steps within the office will turn out to make big savings for your business in the long run. Photo / ThinkStock
When it comes to software knowledge, I believe each small increment of learning can make a significant difference to your, and your company's bottom line.
Your problem today: Staff are flat out. Software changes quickly - especially the devil of going from the menu to the ribbon system in Microsoft.
Habits form. Tight budgets eliminate training. New hires don't know your software. University graduates don't have a clue about Outlook as all they use is webmail.
Your Cost: The precious and costly commodity called time, wasted. Opportunities lost, especially lost sales. Things done one by one by one rather than many at once. Stress.
Examples: Taking 45 minutes first thing in the morning with email instead of 15 minutes by using time saving techniques such as Rules, Quick Parts, Archive, Search folders. This might not seem like such a big deal, ½ an hour a day. Let's look at the numbers though. An average salary per hour for an admin staff member $25; for a senior executive $100; for a professional working on billable hours at $150. Thirty minutes a day, five days a week, 45 working weeks a year. That is 112.5 hours annually. The admin person, it's $2812.50 per year paid time wasted. For the executive, it's $11250 a year wasted. For the professional services, it's $16875 of billable hours lost. Now multiply this by the number of staff in your business.
Losing a prospective sale from forgetting to follow up. How many times has this happened? It's easy to keep control simply by knowing about and using the Task/ To Do function of all software programs.
