How to Improve Business Productivity (Leveraging Visual How-to Guides)

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How to use visual guides to boost business productivity

Business leaders can improve productivity by using visual guides for redundant business tasks. They would otherwise require additional time and labor. These can include various routine instructions that you handle, for instance:

Onboarding

Specialized training

Training meetings

Feedback meetings

Instructions for using tools

Redundant presentations

These guides can also help your remote team. Remote employees can access these guides across the world at their convenience. This way, you wouldn't have to schedule meetings at odd hours due to the time difference.

Let's talk more about how visual guides can boost productivity.

Create video content for onboarding

Companies hire new employees all the time. But if someone has to onboard them whenever a new employee comes, they must juggle multiple tasks. As a result, their productivity will decrease. But to increase workplace productivity, the business owner may create an onboarding video.

This way, whenever you hire a new employee, a standard video introduction can introduce them to the work environment and their tasks.

Usually, the new employees would be required to use productivity software that they have not used before. Or they might be expected to use other project management tools. In that case, you can create a step-by-step visual guide that explains all the features of the tools to them.

That way, they wouldn't have to bug their colleagues or wait for someone to explain the tools to them so that they could start. This will increase employee productivity and improve profitability.

Make visual guides for evergreen specialized training

If your business is a niche area, you will need to provide specialized training to some employees before they can start working. Like the onboarding tasks, this can also be turned into a self-help guide instead of an actual person showing how to do things.

For example, suppose you work in a laboratory. In that case, you will be expected to train your employees in occupational hazards and how to safely handle the equipment. This means you will need to spend time with each of them individually or as a group. Plus, as more new people keep coming in, there will be more orientations of how the team works.

This might be the biggest distraction for some people. Especially since you wouldn't know when someone will get promoted or someone new will be hired. Therefore, they will need to make time in their schedule on an impromptu basis.

Instead of someone handling the orientation, you can save time by creating a visual guide. This guide will contain all the information about where someone might find the required reagents and how to handle them.

You can add the standard safety symbols of each reagent in the guide. That way, when someone's using the reagents, they will know how to handle them.

Plus, people can keep returning to the guide when they forget something. It will be a nightmare if they keep coming to you to ask questions every other day. This won't let you stay focused. It's especially true for people working remotely. If you need to answer their questions, you must schedule entire meetings.

Talking about meetings, that's another thing you can replace with guides to boost employee productivity.

Use video guides to replace meetings

You might think that meetings are needed to encourage employees to work more efficiently and improve business productivity. However, that's another thing that takes up too much time. A successful business doesn't require unnecessary meetings for things that could have been solved with an email.

Therefore, another way of increasing productivity is replacing redundant meetings with how-to guides. This will come especially in handy with remote work.

For example, you might hold a meeting to discuss that your company is moving to a new project management tool. Let's say they are offering everyone a free account. However, setting up the account requires some technical expertise. And that's what the meeting is for - a tutorial on how to set up your account.

Think of it, you have to hold an entire meeting for just one task. You have to clear up your schedule. You have to send out the meeting invite and then confirm the meeting members. You have to explain the purpose of the meeting. And finally, you have to create the slides for the meeting.

At the end of everything, you still have to answer questions about creating the account several days later. Because people probably forgot some key details.

Now, you need to remember that you shouldn't be working this hard. You should be working smart.

To schedule one meeting, you have to create piles of documents and spend time on the meeting itself.

To increase productivity levels, you could spend a fraction of that time creating a visual guide. This can be a video or a document. People will be able to refer back to it whenever necessary. That's how you make sure your company is performing optimally.

Give and allow for visual feedback

You can also use visual guides for feedback. That feedback can be read and reread as often as it takes for the employee to get it right. That way, they wouldn't need to keep taking up your time for reviews. This will help in improving productivity.

Usually, creative projects like design or writing require a lot of back and forth with feedback. If your subordinates are working on a project and submit it to you, they will need immediate feedback. Without you, they can't go forward. As a result, you will need to move the feedback meeting to the top of your priority list.

Even during the meeting, you might not be able to fully convey your point. For example, you may be focusing on one part of the design, trying to explain what color works best here. And then you might move on to another section.

As a result, your employees will have to focus on more than one thing. They might lose track of the task you assigned to them a few minutes back while listning to the current task. Thus, all your effort would go to waste because they will keep coming back to you to hear the tasks again.

Or they will just submit an incomplete revision, requiring you to hold another meeting. The key here is not to keep on holding meetings. It's how to make your business more efficient.

If you use the right tools, you wouldn't even need to schedule a meeting in the first place. You can just take screenshots of where you want to see changes. You can annotate these screenshots with the exact changes you would like to see.

These screenshots can be sent to your workers, and within a few minutes, you will have saved several hours' worth of redundant work. That's called being productive!

But feedback isn't the only thing required to increase your employee engagement. Sometimes, they will need your help, too.

Provide personal assistance via visual step-by-step guides

From time to time, your team needs your help. It's your job to assist your team and solve their problems.

Chances are different people might occasionally come up to you with the same query. Answering one or two questions is okay, but having to answer the same question over and over will waste time. Instead, you can boost efficiency with a step-by-step guide.

Whenever someone faces that problem again, they can read the guide instead of coming to you. The guide will be much more efficient, too, because it will show them exactly how to perform each step to fix the error.

For instance, you might be the IT administrator of your company. Imagine that your company installs a new WiFi network. Logging into it will require special administrative privileges. The entire staff would come up to you and ask you to set up the new network on their mobile phones.

Imagine doing that for 20 or more people; you can already see it's a nightmare. On the flip side, you can just create a visual guide. The employees can access this guide on the intranet and see how to set up the connection themselves. Congratulations! You just saved your work hours and significantly improved your office's efficiency.

Things like these come up all the time in companies of all sizes. Therefore, it's best to create sustainable solutions that can enhance productivity.

Increasing workplace productivity means no employee is stuck for too long on something that has an easy fix. It's good to let your employees figure out problems on their own. However, being stuck in a rut can affect their physical and mental health.

Describe tools and their usage via step-by-step guides

Step-by-step guides really come in handy for tutorials. Suppose your company switches tools or starts using new ones. In that case, several employees will need training before they can use those tools efficiently.

It will be very counterintuitive if you keep giving those tutorials in person. Instead, you should make step-by-step guides that people study at a self-paced level and learn the tool to its fullest.

For instance, imagine that you are in the social media marketing business. Your company might start using a new SEO tool that only you know how to operate well. If you go around doing demonstrations or tutorials, it will waste a lot of time.

Plus, some employees might be less well-versed in technology than others or be slow learners. Therefore, they might not be able to keep up with your pace. This will reduce productivity.

But an easy fix for it is step-by-step guides akin to the ones you would see on the internet.

If you just search "how to build a docker image," you will see hundreds of articles with step-by-step guides. What's the best part about them? You can read them as quickly or slowly as you want.

An experienced DevOps engineer might only need one small point of information to fix their problem. On the other hand, someone who's completely new to docker images will likely need to read the entire article.

If you put these people in the same meeting, you will waste their time (and yours). That's why step-by-step guides can increase business productivity.

Use step-by-step guides for design presentations

You can also increase the productivity of your design presentations by using step-by-step guides. In a presentation, you will be required to speak about all the different aspects of the design. However, if it's a long presentation, people may lose focus and miss many points.

You can boost employee engagement by using a step-by-step guide. This guide can be sent out to everyone via email, which saves time. In this guide, you can explain the different aspects of design in detail.

This way, people can learn more about the design whenever they want, in however much detail they want. This can significantly help you improve the productivity of both your team and your business productivity as a whole.

Takeaway: Increase employee productivity to boost productivity as a whole

Creating visual guides can really help you save a lot of time. But creating these guides also takes a lot of effort. However, with the help of Splainy, you can create visual how-to guides automatically!

That's right. You can be even more productive and save time you would have otherwise spent making the guides yourself. And the best part is, it's free! So what are you waiting for? Sign up for Splainy now.