Reduce Archives - GUJRAT INDIA

How to Reduce Wastage of Office Stationery and Supplies – Some Useful Tips and Tricks!

“A penny saved is a penny earned.” – Benjamin Franklin (One of the Founding Fathers of the United States)

One of the primary concerns of most businesses and organisations is being cost effective and ensuring that the company funds are put to good use. The right way to achieve this is not by reducing procurement but by reducing wastage and misuse of office supplies and stationery, which can actually punch a big hole into the company funds and increase overhead costs in the long run.

The two main areas of office supplies that are generally more prone to get wasted are Stationery and Paper Products. However, the good news is that all one needs is just a little bit of caution and care to curb this wastage. That’s why; starting today, let’s make conservation a habit not just for environmental causes but even in the office as well.

Keep a Check on Office Stationery to Reduce Wastage!

Without anyone to manage and keep an eye on office stationery, their consumption can often go out of hand. Appointing an in-charge for managing office supplies and stationery is a good idea to ensure that they are not being misused.

a) This way it will also help you understand which office supplies are most in-demand and which lie at the bottom as redundant resources, to help you order appropriately the next time.

b) Instead of simply handing over office stationery every time an employee asks for it, keep a track in an office stationery register. With this step, once the numbers are in front of them, employees will automatically get conscious of borrowing office stationery like pens or notepads too often and will try to use them judiciously.

c) As a more frantic measure, you can also assign specific office stationery and their respective quantities for each employee per month based on his or her role. So if everyone knows that they can get only three pens or one marker in a month, they will take care to not lose it.

Reuse and Recycle Paper and Paper Products!

Another highly misused and wasted office supplies are paper. According to the Minnesota Office of Environmental Assistance, the average office worker uses 10,000 sheets of copy paper each year. Surely, most of us can make do with a little less! While paper is recyclable, don’t you think it’s a better idea to cut down on its wastage at the primary level as even for recycling, the paper needs to be collected, transported and processed, which, in-turn is an additional expense.

a) The first thing to do here is to educate and create awareness amongst employees. You can start a ‘Save Paper – Save Trees’ campaign at your work place, rewarding employees who strictly follow this practice.

b) Use one-sided paper that’s no longer needed to make notes and rough drafts instead of using fresh paper, post-its and notepads every time.

c) You can also use paper once shredded as packaging supplies to protect fragile items while shipping.

d) Save printer paper by encouraging employees to print on both sides whenever possible.

e) Likewise, you can re-use envelopes, packaging supplies and cardboard boxes that your company has received.

Even small measures taken at the right time can lead to big changes. We hope following these simple yet effective tips will help reduce wastage of office supplies in the long run at your workplace!

Reduce Popular Business Communication Tool Use?

Many managers are looking for ways to improve their business communications and reduce wasted time within and outside their companies. Are the most common business communication tools of meetings and emails the real problem? According to recent studies, the number of meetings and their duration has increased but meetings often are less than 50% productive. Are we using meetings when another communication tool like email might be more effective? Email use is on the rise and this too is getting a bad reputation as overused or poorly constructed. Emails are used for internal communications and external marketing so they need to be effective. Many managers are looking for ways to reduce both meetings and emails in their companies. Is reduction the answer or is the answer using the tools correctly and more effectively?

I’ve written a book on meeting management and articles on what goes wrong in meetings, so I already know where most people need help. I wanted to confirm that others may be concerned about what may go wrong in meetings and that meetings need improvement. Since I recently wrote an on-line article titled “Minding Meeting Manners”, so I thought it might be helpful to use a popular internet search engine to measure how important the topic of “meeting etiquette” or “meeting manners” is. Using these as keyword in my search, the combined total was over 41,900 results. Just to see if there was agreement with some of my meeting improvement ideas in my articles and books, I read a few of the results which had descriptions that indicated they would provide solutions. Much of the text I read included a few of the thirteen items in my article or some of the hints in my book. However, they often listed other problem areas that were job specific. Although the item I reviewed did not yield all the same things I felt were essential, they did reinforce my belief that meetings are important and that everyone needs to better know how to take advantage f this group communication method for business purposes.

After looking up meetings, I decided to check out “email etiquette” and got over 348,000 results. I scanned the list of options in the first few pages and checked out the ones that claimed to include tips in their descriptions. Some of those I read I agreed with as relevant for professional emails and others I disagreed with because they might work for personal email but were not the correct usage for business communications. However, I found that much of the text agreed with many of the thirteen I listed in the on-line article I wrote last month titled “Encouraging Email Etiquette”. Some justified their belief in what they stated with an explanation but most did not. For people to display proper etiquette in emails, they not only need to know what is acceptable but why that should be the norm. Email is a great communication tool but only if the receiver understands what the sender is trying to say. Although I may not agree with every email etiquette item I reviewed, the number of results clearly indicates this is a valid communication concern for business professionals.

I wanted to find out if the two most popular business communication tools needed to be reduced or if they needed to be used effectively. In turning to the internet as a research tool, I’m not sure if the resulting numbers can indicate which tool people really need the most help with or which is used the most. Either way, I feel confident that the results indicate all professionals need both meeting and email communication skills to be improved for business purposes. Improvement and proper utilization is more realistically the answer to business communication problems than trying to reduce the necessary use of meetings or email.

The Other 3Rs (Reduce, Reuse, Recycle) – More Business Tips For Tough Times

With the economy still undergoing a lot of uncertainty, rather than throwing in the towel at your small business, especially if you are in services, you can instead extend the same principles the environmentalists recommend – Reduce, Reuse, Recycle – to what you offer clients and keep the dollars rolling in.

The strategy of reducing doesn’t just apply to the office products you use or how much space you occupy; you need to also look at how to reduce what you offer without taking away from your value proposition. That means never reducing your price, but instead looking at ways to chop up what you do, so that clients can still buy from you while leaving your value proposition untouched.

For example, depending on the work you do, instead of covering the whole project from soup to nuts, you might do the front-end planning while they supply the labor and premises to execute the tasks. Or, they gather the information and then you come in at the back-end to do the analysis and provide the recommendations. The beauty of reducing is that it still leaves you performing the higher-perceived-value tasks out of your overall offering. It doesn’t mean you can’t do entire projects if clients still have the budgets; of course you can! But for those customers who are cutting back, you can tailor to the funds available. As they say, no-one is ever remembered for their prices but they are for their value.

This leads to the second part of the formula, Re-use. In this case, while you can go on making good use of your paper clips over and over, it also means looking outside your four walls for ways that can help your clients. One form of “re-use” is putting people to work that your clients might otherwise have to lay off. Perhaps a client has always wanted to undertake a major nationwide survey, but has never had the budget? Or, they want to do some business development work but didn’t have the feet on the street? Rather than paying the much higher costs, which include markups, to an outside firm such as yours, they instead have you act as manager of an in-house team and put their surplus people plus your expertise to work. This way, your client will see you as even more indispensable to their business while the customer teams you manage will get the job done.

Even if you’re already recycling waste paper and other items at the office, you need to also look at how to recycle past work you have done for clients. While any such initiatives must avoid betraying client confidentiality, especially if you have signed agreements to this effect, by taking the generic parts of existing client work, perhaps even from past work for several clients, and finding ways to recycle these as products you can sell, you will meet two goals. One is, you will generate some revenue and two, you will have found another way to introduce prospective customers to your services. You might want to bring out a series of reports or your First Annual Survey of X about a market in which you do a lot of work; if you have done such work over the last 12 to 24 months for large corporate clients, finding ways to recycle this information to small businesses will introduce you to a market segment that you might normally not serve.

While no one likes a shaky economy, by using the 3 Rs to your advantage, you will be better able to weather the storms and position yourself for the fourth R – Recovery – when that happens!
Copyright Deborah C. Sawyer

Reduce the Risk of Starting a Business

Most people consider starting your own business as one of the riskiest undertakings possible. Of course, most people are not entrepreneurs. True entrepreneurs know that successful startups are all about controlling and managing risk. Their entire outlook revolves around doing whatever it takes to identify threats and obstacles and find the way around, over, or through them.

The risks that non-entrepreneurs perceive cover four basic areas – financial, career, personal brand (ego), and lifestyle. Financial risk is the obvious concern. They worry that the failure of a startup will lead them directly to bankruptcy court. Of course, there are many ways to protect yourself and your personal assets…keeping your business and personal finances separate is just plain common sense.

Career and personal brand risk also cause worry. People are afraid that if they go out on their own and fail, they will lose traction on their previous career path and become known as the one who failed. In fact, if you have built a solid reputation and good networking relationships, returning to the workforce won’t be all that difficult (except that once you work for yourself, it is very difficult to report to someone else!). And, those who consider you a failure because your startup floundered are the type of people who cut others down just to feel better about themselves. Most people, especially those close to you, will consider you a hero for even giving it a shot!

The ideas about lifestyle risk are generally pretty accurate. Startups take up all of your thoughts and most of your time. You will probably not see your family and friends very much during the early stages, and when you do, you will probably not be the greatest company (unless they want to talk about your business). You are likely to be a walking ball of stress until your venture gets off the ground, and there is a possibility that you and your family will be enjoying Ramen noodles for every meal for a few months. But all of those lifestyle changes pay off in spades once your company takes off. As our favorite quote states, “Entrepreneurs are people who are willing to live like most won’t in order to live like most can’t!”

There are a number of specific actions a first-time entrepreneur can take to mitigate these risks into something manageable, if not unnoticeable. First, take the time to truly plan your business idea. Dig into the details of every aspect of your venture, break them down and look for better, faster, and smarter ways to get the job done. Second, be realistic about the financial repercussions of going out on your own. If you start a business with no working capital, you are going to be broke during the early stages. If you commit all of your personal resources to the effort, you are putting them all at risk. If you don’t learn to manage finances, both personal and business, you will have a hard time finding success in either area.

Third and finally, learn all you can about the fundamentals of business and the specifics of what you want to do. Striking a balance between the actual operations and the business of running a business is a critical, but often overlooked, necessity to controlling risk and finding the success you seek..