9 Productivity Tips

INTRODUCTION

Productivity has never been more top-of-mind. Clearly, this is because nearly every business has been forced into a distributed workforce due to coronavirus-related restrictions. However, I believe there is a silver lining to what is otherwise a global tragedy. That silver lining comes in the form of work productivity.

Before we dive in, I want to mention a benefit of this coronavirus shakeup. Not unlike the 2008 financial crisis, we are being forced to examine how we conduct business. We all understand that it’s easy to be profitable when the economy is strong. However, when the economy is in turmoil, those who can be profitable truly appreciate their business and have developed highly productive processes. 

For those firms that intend to survive, you have been forced to reevaluate your processes and technologies. Those firms that turned this situation into a motivating force—to think smarter about their business—have reaped the benefits that every downturn eventually yields.

In a recent article entitled 7 Best Practices for Managing a Remote Team, I highlighted specific tools and techniques your firm should implement to help you overcome the loss of working alongside your colleagues in a traditional, co-located setting. Now that a month has passed and we’ve been able to get results from firms working under these new conditions, I am confident that productivity can not only be maintained but also increased.

Lastly, professionals don’t realize this since they are so accustomed to working in physical teams, but solitude increases productivity. Studies show that being surrounded by people kills productivity. People perform better with a bit of privacy. Today, we’re having that privacy imposed on us.

9 TIPS TO IMPROVE PRODUCTIVITY FOR YOUR FIRM

Here are my nine tips to help you increase your productivity, grow your business, and take advantage of our brave new world.

1. CHANGE YOUR EMAIL BEHAVIOUR

Many people live and breathe through email, but this is detrimental to their productivity. Email is a tool that makes you lose control of your day. All the things you planned to accomplish will be waylaid the moment you look at your inbox.

I recommend that you don’t open your email until you’ve completed at least two hours of work. I personally don't open email until 11 am and then close it until 3 pm. This gives me enough time in the day to accomplish what is at the top of my priority list. Let your team know that if something is urgent, they should use text or phone to reach you immediately.

Create your own priority mailboxes. After scanning your emails, place them in the mailbox corresponding to the priority. For example, create three mailboxes: “High Priority,” “Medium Priority,” and “Low Priority”. After reading an email (or just the subject line and sender), move it to one of these mailboxes for later, when you can give it more attention.

Many email clients allow the sender to set the priority. This is very different from you, the recipient, deciding how important it is for you. 

2. DAILY STAND-UP MEETINGS 

Gather your team (virtually), first thing each morning. Then, go around the room, and give everyone one to two minutes to discuss what is on their to-do list for the day and what is needed from any other team member to help them complete their tasks. For most teams, this meeting provides two benefits in today’s WFH environment. 

First, it visually brings the team together, which we all took for granted when we worked in a co-located setting. This helps reinforce your team culture, which is at risk when your workers are temporarily or permanently distributed.

The second benefit is that it forces each employee to think about what they plan to accomplish each day and verbalize this to the team. This builds accountability, which was more easily overlooked when we worked in physical proximity. People could “look” busy but not really make progress. Having people state their objectives for the day and making it a habit guarantees productivity. In addition, having a shared document that everyone can see keeps everyone accountable.

3. OVER-COMMUNICATE FOR ENGAGEMENT

This tip is especially relevant today, given that your workforce is distributed. Managers should communicate with their team members throughout the day to ensure they know what is expected and when it is due, and to reinforce accountability. 

When delegating work, provide enough information so your team members don’t need to hunt for materials needed to complete the task. If the request requires access to a document, include a link to it in your instructions. If a picture is worth a thousand words, attach an image to explain the issue.

4. SEND INVOICES ELECTRONICALLY ON SEPARATE CYCLES

On average, 71 percent of businesses' administrative time is spent on accounting and payment processing tasks. These include issuing invoices and chasing payments. 

Manually creating, printing, and mailing invoices is a colossal waste of time and exposes you to input errors, forgotten invoices, and other costly mistakes. Stop wasting time on archaic invoicing processes and switch to digital processes.

While issuing invoices is unavoidable, manually issuing them is not. BQE CORE is one solution that assists businesses with digital invoicing.

Many firms invoice their clients monthly and do this process at the end of each month. The tradition probably began because invoicing used to be a very difficult procedure requiring many hours (or days) of time from various people in the firm. It was very disruptive to the everyday responsibilities of project managers and principals. Their unavailability or lack of focus would make matters worse and often delay invoicing. 

Smart time and billing software solutions like BQE CORE make the entire invoicing process a breeze while also automating your invoicing cycle. For example, taking half of your projects and billing them in the middle of the month will help spread out your cash flow rather than waiting for all your A/R to come in during one week.

After all, we don’t eat all the calories necessary to keep us running for a month in a single sitting. Nor do we eat a single meal each day. We consume calories closer to the period needed to match our exertion. This is much more efficient and healthy. Same for your billing and expenses.

5. INVEST TIME TOWARDS PROJECT BUDGETING AND ALLOCATION

This tip is really a call to plan your projects thoughtfully. Most of you understand the tasks to be accomplished at each stage of a project. In addition, many of you are so experienced that you do this without a checklist. However, just like a pilot who has flown for decades never takes off or lands without reviewing a written checklist, neither should you. This is a proven tactic for success and risk reduction. 

Solutions like BQE CORE can provide data to help you understand how much time is required (based on past performance) to complete tasks on similar projects. Use this information to build your budgets and ensure that your fees can accommodate your needs.

Having properly planned and budgeted your project means solutions like BQE CORE will enable you to schedule your tasks with appropriate personnel and monitor their progress.

Project planning and budgeting give you the ability to see real-time information about how you are performing against your plan and make adjustments on the fly. BQE CORE will let you instantly understand your productivity on a project as well as your financial health—all through the simple fact that you did budget planning up-front. 

6. MAKE YOUR FIRM A “MOBILE-FIRST” PRACTICE

Expecting team members to sit down at a computer to accomplish a task shouldn’t always be necessary. Make sure you have selected the right business tools that give your team mobile access. This doesn’t mean using a mobile device to access a browser. It means ensuring your business applications also offer truly native mobile apps. 

Each of us has a mobile device that is often in hand. At worst, it’s a few inches away. Having access to critical business data on your mobile device means no time wasted on getting to a computer. 

Solutions like BQE CORE are not only native cloud platforms but also use native mobile apps that allow your team to do anything from the palm of their hand. It will notify them of important matters rather than expecting them to have to go to a computer or the mobile device’s browser to figure out what’s important.

7. DOCUMENT & REEVALUATE

There’s a famous Latin proverb: “Verba volant, scripta manent.” This translates to “Spoken words fly away, written words remain.” Way back in 1988, I learned this the hard way (don’t ask). Ever since that horrible day, I’ve been keen to document anything that might be meaningful. 

Anything from client, consultant, and team member conversations to tracking every hour and expense should be written down. The benefits of time and expense tracking are clearly significant from a financial perspective— budgeting, reporting, and billing. But your productivity will also increase when you document much, much more.

Some of you may pride yourselves on your memory, but there will be a time when it conflicts with the other party's memory. Having contemporaneous notes can save you countless hours, headaches, and attorney fees. 

Every time you document something, use it as an opportunity to reevaluate your project plan. For example, it may result in a change order to your client, obviating the need to write off valuable time you spent and bringing value to the client, but not to your firm.

8. AUTOMATE WORKFLOWS

So much of what we do in business is perfunctory but requires time. Too often, firms shy away from doing these things since they require effort but yield little glory. 

For example, firms commonly use spreadsheets to manage data. This is not only inefficient, but it has a high potential for inaccuracy. 

Business solutions designed for the AE industry, such as BQE CORE, offer many automation features that are highly valuable and increase productivity across the firm. For example, having important reports automatically prepared and sent to appropriate recipients on a pre-defined schedule means no one in the firm has to stop, gather data, collate it, and make it presentable. Instead, the software is taught which reports people require, when they could use them, and sends them via email without any human involvement.

Other workflows that firms often overlook include submitting and approving vendor bills, project budgets and estimates, purchase orders, invoices, time-off requests, timecards, and expenses. BQE CORE lets you submit all of these for review by the appropriate people to ensure they are acceptable. By automating these workflows, you will become much more productive. 

For example, BQE CORE will know that a vendor bill has been approved and should appear as a billable expense (with markup) on the next invoice. Later, when the client pays the invoice, the system notifies you about the associated vendor bill and lets you pay it instantly.

9. INVEST IN YOUR INDUSTRY’S SOFTWARE

Research which applications and mobile apps are built to meet the unique needs of your industry. For example, many architects and engineers use products like Bluebeam Revu, Autodesk BIM 360 , BQE CORE,  Procore, Miro Whiteboard, and ArchiSnapper.

Find solutions that are cloud-native and include native mobile apps, so your firm can rest assured that it uses the most advanced technologies that will not require you to change your systems in the coming decade. Adopting new applications and business platforms is a significant task, so don’t do it without careful consideration, or you will find your future productivity in the toilet.

CLOSING REMARKS

Think of productivity as an architect or an engineer. Clearly, we recognize the importance of planning. Before a shovel hits the dirt, months or years of planning have gone into the project to ensure that the construction phase goes as smoothly as possible. 

We live in a fractal universe: the same attributes must be applied at every level. Plan every aspect of your firm. Plan every detail of your project and plan how you utilize your resources (employees). Once you do this, your firm (like your projects) will be sustainable, resilient, and beautiful.