As a freelancer or small business owner, you might be ready to ditch the shoebox that has faithfully (albeit very haphazardly) kept your business expenditure receipts, and use an online tool. Opting for Avaza will enable you to bring your business processes onto a single platform like invoicing, payments, project management, time-tracking, team collaboration and yes, expense tracking. Warning: you are likely to experience the following ‘Aha!’ moments during this transition:- Read More
As a small business owner, a freelancer or team member in a company, your time is often billable, accountable and valuable. You sell your services based on a fixed price or blocks of time. Time is thus your most critical asset, but how much of it is wasted in admin work or on projects and activities that are less profitable than others?
Meet James, a lawyer with license to practice in three different countries, which means he travels frequently and bills in different currencies. His dad was also a lawyer – back in the era when there were dinosaurs, and secretaries using voice recorders to note the beginning and end of client engagements… James, being Next Gen, uses Excel spreadsheets to track his hours, copying details across to an invoice when it’s time to bill. But he is often out and about, and forgets to track many engagements.
Meet Nicola. She heads up a web design firm and has a team of designers that work on projects for a diverse set of clients. She uses email for collaborating with her team members and Microsoft Word template for timesheet entries. She is considering upgrading to an online system that addresses the demands of her growing business.
We all know that the world of work is becoming increasingly complex and competitive. Every other day a depressing new study tells us that modern work structures and processes are failing us. That we are overworked but unproductive, saturated with information, disengaged, watch too many cat videos at work, blah blah…
But why would we watch those enticing cats rather than getting work done? Are we as workers bored, tired, frustrated or simply slothful?
Productivity is the holy grail of businesses and organisations, but we seem to be seeking it in the wrong places. What makes employees more productive? Is it a finely defined process and command structure? Stringent accountability mechanisms or robust performance indicators? A lot of modern businesses focus on these key areas. But as Yves Morieux of BCG recently points out in an illuminating talk, the new frontier of productivity is cooperation – how you interact, collaborate and combine efforts with your team to go for the collective win for your business.
So it’s worthwhile to ask yourself how well you cooperate with others in pursuit of your work goals. Are your organisation’s reward and accountability mechanisms actually getting in the way of achieving your overall mission? Do you have the tools available to foster internal and external communication? Are you and your team focusing your energies on the right outlets that would enable productivity?
Avaza team recommends the following rules to enhance the productivity of your business: Read More
We all have been there – the pointless, unproductive meetings that hamper your workday instead of getting things done. CEOs around the world reportedly spend one-third of their time in meetings, and workers often cite meetings as the biggest time-waster at work, costing $37 Billion to the US economy alone.
Ideally, meetings should enable better work results by bringing people together to share ideas, exchange viewpoints and drive outcomes towards common goals. But disorganisation and lack of focus can quickly lead to a session where a lot is said but not much progress is made towards desired outcome.
Managers that value productivity can benefit greatly from the new generation of productivity tools out there that enable easy online collaboration for teams. If you use one for project management, you will have all your team added as collaborators in one easy place where you can assign tasks, view status updates, share documents and discuss issues.
So before your next mind-numbing meeting, remember that technology can… Read More
