Effective Ways To Make Your Business More Flexible

For every new business owner, one of the main challenges you can expect to face is the ability to make your business flexible enough to cope with modern changes and improve time management. One of the main changes contemporary business faces in terms of flexibility is remoting working. And if recent trends are anything to go by, remotely working has come to stay. As a business owner, the faster you can make your business adopt ways to make your operations more flexible, the more competitive you will be in the modern business world. So, are you looking to make your business, working staff, or working hours more flexible? Here are a few tips you can use.

Remote working

Technology has led to significant advancement in almost every sphere of human endeavors, including the way we do business. Through tech advancements, remote working has not only become increasingly possible over the past decade but is now a ‘culturally-accepted’ way many organizations conduct their businesses. According to some research, at-home workers reported increased productivity and higher job satisfaction, which also affects business productivity. 

Different roles create different demands on any working staff. But almost any business can benefit from implementing measures that make it possible for their teams to work from practically anywhere. And, if you’re looking for ways to improve your business flexibility without adding extra costs, why not try out a virtual office? You can also take advantage of several free remote working tools available online to help boost working productivity.

Deploying new solutions make it possible for your staff to be productive even when on the move. For example, you can equip them with or encourage them to take advantage of smartphones, tablets, or even desktops to help them operate seamlessly while on the move. Doing this is essential to promoting working flexibility. Also, new software, cloud-based solutions offer business flexibility in many essential ways. 

Creating a flexible working environment

Being flexible or promoting flexible working doesn’t always have to be about working from home. It also has to do with ensuring that you create a relaxed working environment for your in-office workers. It means taking the time to develop unique strategies tailor-made to help make your working staff give off their best for your company. Here are a few things you consider in this regard. 

First, start by being open to discussions about flexible working conditions when interviewing applicants for positions. For example, if a candidate enquires if you’re open to letting them visit a sick relative or take a child to dance class once a week. You may miss out on great talent if your working environment isn’t flexible enough. Secondly, does your office have a recreation room where your workers’ kids can hang out for a while while they wait for their parents to finish up? The options are numerous as far as creating a flexible working environment is concerned. If you already have a working staff, the most important thing to do is find out from them what work flexibility means to them to improve their productivity.

Turning your staff into entrepreneurs

Every successful entrepreneur is ready and willing to take on specific enterprises or ventures and also accepts full responsibility for the outcome. You can turn your working staff into entrepreneurs by making them flexible enough to take on duties or tasks they believe in. You can also encourage your team to think outside the box with the way they handle their jobs. For example, if you have lengthy bureaucratic procedures that do nothing but slow down business operations, make it possible for your staff to go around them. 

Sometimes, strict adherence to tight rules offers little in terms of productivity as it makes your working hours less flexible. Entrepreneurs think outside the box, and that is what you should encourage your team to do. That will make them more flexible enough to handle even the most difficult situations and accept full responsibility for them. Focus on what works and get your supervisors and team leaders to shift their energy from what isn’t working to how to make things work. 

Creating flexible hours

We have already mentioned the importance of creating a flexible working environment for your in-office working staff. An essential aspect of any flexible working environment has to do with the working hours. For example, you can make it possible for workers to spend their first hours in the day working from home, instead of being caught up in traffic on their way to work.

Also, the improvement of technology in different sorts has made it possible to create flexible working patterns for your staff. For example, you can have one group working in the office while another group works from home – rotating as needed to suit their individual needs. 

As mentioned earlier, flexible remote working conditions are important and help to boost staff productivity. But aside from that, it also helps with staff retention while making it easier to meet customer needs. 

Another huge advantage of creating flexible working hours is that it helps businesses operate beyond the ‘traditional working hours,’ making it possible to offer your services to your customers around-the-clock without any disruption.

Build on trust

To be able to make flexible working conditions more successful, you need to trust your working team. If you want them to work from home or have more flexible working hours, you will have to consider if you trust them to get their work done on time. To build trust, endeavor to know your workers on a personal level, instead of seeing them merely as people working for you. Establish some level of cordiality or even friendship to start building trust.

You can also start a trial run of working flexibility to assess the weakness you need to work on. When implementing work flexibility, ask yourself if you’re ready to offer your workers the assistance they need to meet deadlines. Are you prepared to allow your on-site worker to stay at home if they need to, as long as they can get the job done from home and log in those hours? It all boils down to how well you trust your team. The last thing you want to do is continually checking on your remote workers every minute to see if they’re making progress. Not only is the time-wasting, but it is also very disruptive. 

Promote flexibility based on brand strategy

One of the most important keys to creating sustainable working flexibility is to commit to a marketing strategy that forms the basis of all your tactical decisions. In other words, your strategic goals should determine the kind of flexibility tactics you decide to use. There is no one-method-fits-all solution when it comes to promoting a flexible business. And the last thing you want to do, as a business owner, is to become a victim of trendy tactics that do not add anything positive to your business development or strategic goals. 

Work according to your business calendar

Flowing from our previous point, work with your business schedule or your business calendar if you want to be effective in implementing working flexibility. Many people might consider this a bit counter-intuitive at first. However, the logic here is pretty simple – the more structured your business hours are, the more flexible you can be with your time. That is because creating a well-structured business day means that you have a clearer picture of what you need to do each day to be more productive with your time. When you have a working plan and stick to it, it allows you to be flexible and productive at the same time.