How Scheduled Office Hours Can Help Your Start-Up Business
A lot of work goes into running a business. You’re always being pulled in different directions by different tasks. It’s easy to get so focused on each individual task that you lose sight of the big picture. This leads to disorganization and confusion, not just for you, but everybody who works for you. To help counter this, a lot of business owners are starting to have scheduled office hours for themselves.
What Are Scheduled Office Hours?
Simply put, scheduled office hours are a set period when you will be in the office. These are planned as a part of your regular schedule and kept consistent. You always know that, barring something completely unforeseen, you will be in the office during the scheduled time. How does this help? Let’s take a look.
1. Refocus On What Matters
As I said earlier, it’s easy to get so wrapped up in individual tasks of running a business that you forget to look at the bigger picture. When you get hyper-focused like this, you can end up spending vastly more time on a project than it merits. Scheduled office hours are a good time to take a step back from the individual projects and take a look at how important they are in the context of the whole business. Use them to decide what is most important to focus your time on and keep things running smoothly.
Photo by Anete Lusina
2. Keep Your Records Organized
It’s important to keep records of everything your business does, but just as important is keeping them organized. Organization is one of the easiest things to forget when you’re rushing to get everything done. You have all these notes and records that you’re taking, but you’ve got to get to the next big thing, so you put them in the office and move on. Doing this leads to disorganization and the longer you do this, the more disorganized everything becomes. Scheduled office hours are a great time to go through the records collected between periods and make sure they’re properly organized.
3. Plan Your Operations
Operations management is all about efficiency. Keep everything running smoothly by making sure you have your staff available when needed, plan around where people are going to be, etc. Of course, everybody needs time off – including you! – so, planned office hours are a great time to make sure you’re up to date on where everybody is going to be on what days and what they should be doing.
4. Keep In Touch With Your Employees
Harvard Business Review frames this point by comparing it to scheduled office hours for a professor in college. The professor is often busy and unable to focus on you because he or she has so many projects they’re juggling. But if you need help, you can always find them during their scheduled office hours. Similarly, you as the business owner have a lot of work to do and it’s easy to get so focused on it that you get detached from the ground situation.
Scheduled office hours give you a time when employees can come in and inform you of what is going on. Sometimes they’ll just be saying they need to be out of town, maybe there’s some drama going on. Their reasons for visiting might not seem super important, but staying informed about it can help you head off potential problems. It’s also a good way to just build rapport with the people who work for you. Building rapport builds loyalty, and that is a hot commodity for any business owner.
Photo by Andrea Piacquadio
When Should I Have My Scheduled Office Hours
It’s ultimately whatever works best for you. We hear a lot of people say Monday is the best day. It helps start the week with fresh eyes and helps you prepare for the rest of it. Some say that the best office hours are the day before you take your break, so that you can finish things up and have nothing on your mind when it’s time to relax. Whatever the case, the important part is that your office hours are consistent and that you stick to them unless something significant forces you away. That way, not only do you always know when you’re going to be in, but so does anybody who might need to meet with you.
Let Us Help You Out
While scheduled office hours are great for helping you stay organized and keep in touch with your business’s ground situation, you can’t do everything yourself. Everybody needs a little help from time to time with covering their business’s needs. If you find that bookkeeping isn’t your thing, we can help you out! Our virtual assistants are capable of managing your books while you focus on the parts of your business that you do best, like sales.
If you need some help, why not get in touch with us? We’re always happy to help.