How to Employ More Proactive Measures to Save Time in Your Organization

If you want your organization to save time and generally spend labor resources more productively, it’s important for your teams to develop a proactive mentality. With more proactive measures and fewer reactive ones, you can prevent problems and streamline workflows.

But how exactly does this work in practice?

The Proactive Mindset

The proactive mindset is one that attempts to anticipate and prevent issues, rather than waiting for issues to arise before addressing them. It’s about gathering information, analyzing it, and acting on it even in the absence of any external stimuli motivating you to take action.

For example, many businesses have suffered from dealing with hosting issues after launching a website. Only after setting up all the fundamentals do they realize they don’t have dedicated servers and can’t handle spikes in traffic – or worse, they realize there are glaring security issues associated with their website.

You can prevent most of these problems by investing in the best VPS hosting you can afford. However, to do this, you need to be thinking proactively about the issues you could face. It’s a lot easier to prevent DDoS attacks and ensure smooth website performance than to urgently respond to problems once you start noticing them arise.

Why is Proactive Better for Saving Time?

There are many reasons why working proactively in your organization is better in terms of being able to save time.

Preventing Issues

The biggest and most obvious benefit is that proactive work prevents issues, rather than responding to them. If you can correct a defect in your product before a new wave of products is shipped, you can prevent the need to come up with a fix, the need to submit messaging, the need to orchestrate a recall, and the need to deal with a flood of customer complaints. It’s going to cost you some time, and probably some money, to prevent this type of issue, but it’s well worth the investment.

Mitigating Issues

Even if you don’t manage to prevent issues with your proactive work, you should at least be able to mitigate them. While the time equation looks differently for each problem and for each organization, you can think of it this way: spending an hour attempting to prevent an issue might save you three hours on the back end when the resulting issue is lower in severity than what would have occurred otherwise.

Improving Resilience

Proactive work is also an exercise in improving the resilience of your organization. If your leaders, employees, and partners are constantly on the lookout for potential issues, you’ll achieve a level of vigilance and diligence that can keep your organization running strong even in the face of adversity.

Boosting Morale and Job Satisfaction

Higher morale is a great asset for your organization – and it’s associated with benefits far beyond time savings. But even in the realm of time savings, it’s beneficial. This is because it can boost productivity and encourage employees to avoid time waste on their own. When you work proactively, your organization can flow much more smoothly, your employees will have less stress, and they’ll have fewer fires to put out, naturally leading to higher job satisfaction.

High-Level vs. Low-Level Proactivity

Note that proactivity can apply at a low level or high level.

For example, high-level proactive thinking requires organizational leaders to speculate about the future, consider how the organization works broadly, and anticipate issues – even if they would only start applying years into the future. Low-level proactive thinking requires more attention on a day-to-day basis. For example, an employee might ask a customer a few additional questions to make sure they understand their needs correctly.

It’s important to have both high-level and low-level productivity within your organization, since the time saving benefits apply in both contexts. High-level proactive thinking is arguably more important because each action is more impactful, but low-level proactive thinking is important because of the sheer number of low-level interactions that take place within your organization every day.

The Time Investment Paradox

At this point, you may be wondering how proactive work can actually save your organization time, since working proactively demands an investment of time. It’s true that working proactively isn’t going to magically erase all your time requirements. But, the equation should work in your favor. As long as you’re exercising proper discretion in identifying and anticipating proactive measures to adopt, you should spend less time overall. And – as we’ve illustrated before – you should be able to spend your time in more productive, less stressful, and more fulfilling ways.

Starting With the Culture

Everything starts with the culture of your organization.

Organizational Values

Your organization’s core values aren’t just fluff. They have the power to shape your entire workplace environment, so choose them responsibly. Consider integrating a proactive mindset into your organizational values. And, you should also make sure all your employees are familiar with those working values.

Hires

Similarly, you need to hire intelligently. When choosing new people to bring onto the team, prioritize candidates who already have a strong proactive mindset. Ask yourself in each interview: is this someone interested in anticipating future issues and addressing them early?

Education and Training

Even the best candidates are going to need some guidance, so instate good education and training. Make sure your new candidates are paired with experienced supervisors. Specifically, prioritize pairing them with those who can guide them through the process of thinking and acting proactively.

Leadership

In line with this, make sure to hire and promote excellent leaders who demonstrate your proactive core values. If employees see their bosses consistently making predictions and acting with the intention to make the future easier, they’ll be much more likely to follow suit.

Regular Check-ins and Evaluations

You can reinforce this type of culture with the help of regular check-ins and evaluations. Make sure everyone on your team has the support they need, and encourage ongoing conversations about the nature and value of proactive effort.

Making Proactive Effort Easier

It’s also incumbent upon your organizational leaders to make working proactively easier and more accessible to all employees, regardless of their position in the hierarchy:

Strategic Direction and Vision

Establish a high-level strategic direction that embraces and incorporates proactivity. For example, your CTO or IT director can outline some of the most critical responsibilities of the IT department. This can include any major catastrophes that need to be anticipated and prevented.

Clear Workflows

You can also integrate proactive measures into your workflows and standard operating procedures. Even minor steps of verification, vetting, and course prediction can go a long way in preventing disasters.

Automation

You already know that automation saves time. For starters, automation prevents the need for manual labor in many applications. It also reduces the possibility of errors and mistakes, which can be very costly in terms of time. But automation can also function as an extra wing of proactive anticipation. With automated checks and reminders, employees are in a much better position to identify potential issues before they arise or before they worsen in magnitude.

Routine Maintenance

In nearly any organization, the most powerful and proactive way to save time is routine maintenance. Inspecting your equipment, vehicles, web applications, and other assets on a regular basis can alert you to potential problems long before they ever have a chance to affect your organization negatively.

Checks and Balances

You should also implement checks and balances within your organization. This is because even the best and most competent employees can make mistakes. For example, can you have your employees check each other’s work? If someone misses a proactive inspection, can someone else check them and intervene if necessary? Appointing diligent supervisors and holding them accountable is a great first step in this approach.

Issuing Feedback and Adjusting

Finally, it’s important to give and receive feedback. If any of your leaders or employees aren’t working proactively enough, bring it to their attention. And, give them actionable ways that they can improve. If your leaders or employees have ideas for how your organization can work more proactively, listen to them and consider implementing their suggestions. As long as your organization remains flexible, dynamic, and focused on prevention rather than reaction, you’ll have a critical competitive advantage that can lead you to success.

Featured Image Credit: Photo by Yan Krukau; Pexels; Thank you.