Tips & Suggestions

Clever Strategies To Employ To Reduce Your Business Expenses

Author Names, Current, Tips & Suggestions

Written by Cheryl Conklin WellnessCentral.info

It’s unsurprising that starting a business requires a decent amount of money, but expenses don’t disappear once your startup is up and running. As a new business owner, you’ll want to create and keep a dependable budget to manage your finances.

Expense Strategies for Your Business

Finances can seem challenging and dire for a new business owner. You need to find a way to allocate your capital to pay expenses without making a hole in your budget; fortunately, there are many expense strategies to reduce your taxable liability and make your life easier while running a business. If you need methods to stay on top of your financial duties, consider some of the following strategies below, courtesy of Work From Home Buzz!

Use Your Time Wisely

When you are a new business owner, you need to use your time wisely and be productive to save yourself money and time. Using your time wisely is also understanding what you should prioritize each day. You should first realize that you cannot do it all – involve your employees and allow them to add any insight or ideas they consider necessary. Your priority should be growing your business and establishing relationships with your customers, so ensure you leverage social media and other online means. By setting up an automatic reply on social media and setting aside time each day to respond to messages and emails, you create a connection with your audience, which is the path to success.

Consider Remote Work

If your staff doesn’t currently work from home, this could be a great way to reduce overhead costs. Setting your team up for remote work can be considerably cheaper than paying for office space. And as many companies have found over the last year, remote work can be a boon for productivity. It’s true that some employers are wary of this practice from a management standpoint. However, you can still motivate and manage your employees effectively from a distance. Affordable time tracking software makes it easy to track time and adjust timesheets, plus, with a platform like QuickBooks, you can generate real-time reports, adjust schedules as necessary, and even keep tabs from your mobile phone.

Know Your Deductions

Be aware that many of your first expenses count as deductions, so go ahead and purchase software solutions and office furniture for your business and whatever else you need. These upfront costs will help you when it comes to tax time. Other business deductions include your utilities, materials and office supplies, travel, and equipment. Keep all your receipts and include your expenses as part of your tax records, including the health insurance and retirement plans. Many health expenses and retirement savings are tax-deductible, so don’t forget to add them to the list of deductions.

New business owners can manage their time, expenses, and tax responsibilities by using the simple strategies offered here. Financial problems do not have to be complicated, and with the recommended approaches, you can see significant savings that boost your bottom line.

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Work from Home Advice

Tips & Suggestions

Whether you’re an employee or an employer, the massive shift to work from home in 2020 was unexpected. Many companies received little planning time or advice for managing wfh staff. Instead, many gathered work from home tips like these to create their new work environments.

Stay Organized

Whether you’re the employer or the employee, the top work from home tip is staying organized. Typically, your desk and file cabinets do this. However, your new workspace likely lacks these features unless you had an existing home office.

When you are organizing, it’s vital to work with the space you have rather than wishing for more space. To begin, see what you can keep digitally on your work device. Provided you keep the documents organized digitally, this will cut down on the paper volume. Then you can use a small folder system or mail sorter to organize any tasks that require physical papers.

Collaborate

Initially, many people did not realize how many decisions were made in five-minute conversations at the water cooler. You need to restore some of that collaboration without turning all employee days into a series of meetings. Fortunately, there is a simple work from home tip for that.

In many pieces of advice for managing wfh staff, you can increase collaboration by ensuring everyone is accessible during business hours. You may also want to try an easy messaging tool for quick communication without the formality of emails.

Take Breaks and Switch Off

One of the significant work from home tips many people have trouble implementing is breaks during the day and switching off when the workday is over. It’s always tempting to accomplish one more thing and skip breaks. Plus, since work is in your employee’s space, it’s easy for them to boot back up after hours when something occurs to them.

The best advice for managing wfh staff is to remind them periodically that they need to comply with their work agreements. Also, bringing up the legislation regarding breaks, pay, and time off at least once a month can help.

Time Management is Paramount

Creating time management can be difficult, especially when employees are used to having time management enforced by being in the office. Offering work from home time management tips is an excellent option for employee communications. Suggestions like time blocking, calendar use, and distraction reduction can improve your employee productivity.

Protect Company Data

Company data is vital for any business, and work from home introduces new vulnerabilities. Not only should you make sure there are no issues with remote access, but you may also need to remind your employees about your company policies. The best advice for managing wfh staff is sending out updated guidance that fits the current situation.

Be Flexible

Understanding that your employees are juggling multiple hats during the day is essential. Between the kids, the parents, and the pile of tasks, your employees may need a few extra minutes here and there. Additionally, consider granting grace as long as employees are hitting their work goals.

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4 Work from Home Essentials to Increase Productivity

Tips & Suggestions

Home office necessities don’t have to break the bank. While the comforts of the actual office may run the gamut of dual monitors and high-speed printers, your home office setup should be a place that encourages you to be productive with minimal distractions. To make the best out of your remote work environment, make sure you have these three essentials.

1. A Dedicated WFH Space

The most important of home office necessities is the need for a dedicated working area. Whether you have a private in-home office or not, you can and should still be able to carve out a part of your living space for working only. Even if space may be limited, it’s important to try to choose a well-lit area for you to sit at your laptop and work comfortably for 8+ hours. For some that’s the dining room table and for others it’s the basement. Just try to steer clear from rooms with televisions, high-traffic areas (the playroom isn’t ideal) and the couch.

2. Comfortable Seating

Have you ever noticed that the more you slouch down in your seat, the less work you tend to do? That’s because studies have shown that improved posture led to increased efficiency at work, which may also account for why offices don’t supply cushy arm chairs for employees. Look for office chairs with lumbar support or purchase a cushion if a chair isn’t in your budget.

3. Good Old-Fashioned Pen and Notepad

We’re living in the digital age, but there’s something about having a pen and paper besides your computer when you need to jot down something quickly. Whether you use it to write your to-do list or if you have an impromptu call with your boss and need to take notes in a pinch, a good pen and notepad is a work from home essential.

Working remotely can pose a challenge and is an adjustment, but small tweaks and budget-friendly purchases can make help increase your focus and make your office away from the office your favorite place to get the job done.

connecting

Remote Team Motivation

Tips & Suggestions

Remote team motivation is an essential facet of working from home. Staying connected with your wfh team requires more consideration than when people were in the office. However, if you do this correctly, your company will thrive.

Provide Feedback

Providing feedback is an essential function of any office manager. However, remote team motivation means you need to make a point to give that feedback. Positive feedback is as valuable as negative, so make sure you praise your employees while keeping everything on track. This feedback can take the form of quick email notes and fifteen-minute virtual coffee chats.

Create Remote Culture

You know about corporate culture, but creating a remote culture is slightly different. While you cannot replace the water cooler talks or Friday lunches, there are options. Items like weekly shout-outs and team awards meetings can help create a thriving remote culture that connects your employees.

Empower Employees

Staying connected with your wfh team is excellent; however, it’s easy to let micromanagement creep into the relationship. Instead, empower your employees to make their own work decisions. Asking employees their opinions on processes, rewarding deadlines, and generally helping them take ownership of the company will improve your remote team management experience.

Create Break Space

One of the remote working problems is time management for your employees. You may find your team buckling down and skipping breaks to get all their work done quicker. Unfortunately, there are legal issues there. Consider creating various opportunities for breaks and team activities.
One idea is building time into meetings. You can end the session early and offer a group break, such as everyone playing solitaire. There is also the option of providing more open space to the meetings so you can get feedback and stay connected with your wfh team.

Trust

Trust is an essential factor in successful work form home systems. Your employees must feel trusted in order to maintain their productivity. If they think your company is continually looking over their shoulder, they will only do the bare minimum. Trust them to manage their time and meet their deadlines, and they will surprise you.

Create Rewards

Remote work can make team motivation difficult, so introducing a rewards system can help. Visual leader-boards can help employees understand where they are on their projects. Simple rewards like gift cards or bonus time off will help with remote team motivation, provided you maintain other aspects of your company’s remote culture.

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4 Ways to Maintain Employee Motivation

Tips & Suggestions

One of the main challenges posed by having a remote workforce for managers is combating decreased employee motivation. After all, a dip in motivation will result in a dip in productivity which no manager or business owner wants. Here are four quick tips to maintain and even increase remote team productivity and motivation.

1. Prioritize Project Management

This means making sure goals are clear cut, so all parties are on the same page. It’s easy for remote workers to feel adrift, so keeping objectives clear and projects well organized will keep employees engaged and on-task.

2. Employee Recognition

Whether or not your business has an employee rewards program in place or not, there are still ways to reward your staff for a job well done. This can be a simple as sending an email copying senior leadership praising their efforts, or allowing them to log off early one Friday.

3. Keep in Touch

Water cooler talk and cubicle pop-ins aren’t an option, so you’ll need to make sure you’re communicating with your remote staff frequently. Studies have shown that work-from-home motivation among employees is directly linked to effective and consistent communication via instant messaging, conference calls and email. However, be careful not to inundate your staff constant communication. You want to give them the time and freedom to do their jobs well without coming off as a micromanager.

4. Don’t Forget About Team Building

Advances in technology have made team building feasible for all workforces no matter where your employees are located. Many companies use Zoom, Google Meet and other video conferencing technology for not only work-related meetings, but virtual happy hours, trivia games and more. Team building encourages creativity, builds trust and improves morale which is essential to increasing team productivity.

Knowing how to motivate staff when remote is a key component when managing a business. Maintaining motivation is one of the most common work from home challenges, but these four tips are guaranteed to increase employee engagement, satisfaction, motivation and productivity.

3 Work from Home Tips Geared for Success

Tips & Suggestions

Telecommuting is becoming more and more popular with many businesses being forced to send their workforce home due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Early adopters of remote work have mastered how to maintain employee productivity, but if you’re just starting out it can be challenging to get through the workday efficiently. These three work from home tips will help you stay focused, breeze through your checklist and effectively manage your time. 

1. Plan It Out!

If you weren’t in the habit of writing to-do lists, you should consider adding it to your new workday routine. One of the most effective work from home tips that experts advise is meeting with your team and outlining the week’s priorities, and then creating your own individual checklist along with due dates. This will add structure to your day and the satisfaction of crossing a task off your list is immeasurable.

Take Breaks!

Yes, you read that correctly. Just like working in your PJs, working all day without a break is easy to do when telecommuting. While it is not recommended that you take frequent breaks – remember that checklist! – getting up from your computer to stretch your legs, grab a bite to eat or run an errand will increase work from home productivity and prevent burnout.

Keep Personal Tasks to a Minimum

Working remotely doesn’t mean you can start tackling those home projects during office hours. That includes but isn’t limited to laundry, paying bills, hanging photos or anything similar. A good rule of thumb to follow is that if you couldn’t complete it while you were in the office, you shouldn’t do it during office hours. If you’re concerned you’ll forget, simply make a personal to-do list and jot it down for later.Staying focused when working from home doesn’t require a bunch of productivity tools or gimmicks. By incorporating these three habits into your daily routine, you’ll see an increase in efficiency, impress your manager and maintain a healthy work/life balance.

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