Marcus Buckingham, in the book “Go put your strengths to work,” said only 17% of the workforce believes that they use all of their strengths on the job. That means you’ve got over four-fifths of the people in your employ seriously underutilising their skills right now. Imagine if you could clear your desk of some of that work and claim even 10% of the hours that you spend back. If you work for 50 or 60 hours a week, this could equate to five or six hours a day. And for many small business owners growing and scaling their business, this is an excitingly real proposition.
Delegating effectively to make full use of your employee’s strengths is a skill of its own, so let’s quickly look at 10 things that you as a business owner can do right now.
“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together” African proverb
EMAIL MANAGEMENT:
First of all, you can delegate email management, you do not need to have your hand on every single email. If you’re doing anything like the average workweek, 20% – 28% of it is currently being spent on emails, so get rid of that stuff today.
PAYING BILLS:
Bill paying is an important one. There may be some you have to pay yourself, and there will be others you are happy to automate. But for one-off payments or bills you would rather have a person reviewing first, delegation is the answer. Pass it on to a trusted employee and clear that too.
BOOKKEEPING INVOICING:
This leads us to bookkeep and invoicing. Make sure that you’re not the one doing the low-level stuff, though you might want to be meeting with your accountant and keeping the big picture clear in your mind.
CONTENT CREATION:
Next, delegate your content creation. A quality piece of content takes, on average, one to six hours to create. You don’t need to be involved in all of that. Set up the objective then let someone else take it off your hands.
SOCIAL MEDIA POSTING:
This work in content creation can also extend to social media posting. Once you’ve got all of the content created and you need to distribute it, you could save yourself an hour or two each day by delegating. You don’t have to do the work yourself, and you’ll never miss a beat with your social media marketing if someone else has it covered.
DESIGN WORK:
Are you still trying to do all your design work? This is best handled by specialists if you’re not a graphic designer it may as well be the same as if you’re not an accountant. Just like you shouldn’t be doing your tax, you shouldn’t be doing design work. Get it done well by someone trained and go with the stuff you’re good at.
MANAGING THE SITE:
Next, clean up. You don’t need to be managing your worksite yourself. Get onto people who can handle all of the cleaning, maintenance and lower level repairs while you do the work of growing your business.
CALENDAR MANAGEMENT:
Calendar management is another one that could give you back so much. Every little interruption that comes with managing your schedule is an interruption to your workflow. Clear the time you take for low-level tasks like a calendar entry.
DATA ENTRY & FILING:
Data entry and filing are two tasks that, though important, are time-consuming. More importantly, they can be performed by anyone in the business, leaving you free for more important tasks.
TASK DOCUMENTATION:
And finally, task documentation. It’s so important to know that you don’t need to be the one documenting all the tasks. Get your employees to make videos while you train them, then use those to build the bank of your resources up.
In your business, with so many things to occupy your time, the last thing you need to be doing is wiping down benches, cleaning toilets or vacuuming floors. Someone else can do that work and it could give you back an hour or two every day. When you are managing a business, delegating repetitive lower-level tasks will be an important step toward growing your business further.
