Time is money and money is money. How to improve employee performance.
The subject of this blog might be a little confusing when you first read it.
But, if you think about it, it makes sense.
The time you spend or that your employees spend in a day's work is the sum total
of the time they spend doing each individual task. Of course, this includes the
time they spend eating lunch, doing personal erands, drinking coffee or
standing around the water cooler. While you as a business owner can usually see
the time spent that obviously does not contribute to the productive work that
makes your employees worth their salary, and have probably done all you can to
control them, there is still a great deal left over that you may not have even
recognized, let alone found a way to control.
These are hidden costs, sometimes many little costs, in the efficiency with
which they do their productive work. These costs tend to go unrecognized
because they are endemic to the methodology with which tasks are done.
Your employees use the approved methodology, whether formally by edict or
informally by custom. This methodology might very well have been the most
efficient way to perform a given task at some point in time.
But, time marches on. New tools get invented to improve productivity and unless
you employ these tools, the productivity of your company begins to slowly
shrink relative to that of your competitors. Allowing this trend to continue
will, given enough time, make your company lose its competitve edge.
The mere fact that you are reading this blog is clear evidence that you
understand this concept and are on the lookout for new ways to improve your
competitive edge. It is clear evidence that you want to surpass your
competition.
So, what am I really talking about? What new productivity tool am I talking
about?
The new tool to which I refer actually consists of two parts. The first part of
this tool is one of the oldest and most known pieces of software on the market.
It is made by the largest software company in the World. Just about every
business computer has it already installed. I refer to Microsoft Excel®. It is
highly useful and ubiquitous. Much time and money has been spent purchasing,
installing and configuring software that imports data, produces output such as
totals, charts and graphs and so forth. And for good reason. The output is very
useful. This is especially true in micro-businesses and small-businesses who
cannot afford to spend large amounts of money to get the information they need.
Excel has a great deal of power and flexibility. There are also many add-ins on
the market published by a great many software developers to do almost any
imaginable task within Excel such as charting, live data feeds, specialized
output formats and many other functions. But until recently, one of the largest
drawbacks to Excel and one that has been completely ignored by the software
development community and the product that makes up the second part of the
solution to this problem is Quick-XL.
Quick-XL solves the problem of efficient data entry and is a must for those
companies that cannot afford to spend a lot of money for a custom solution to
the problem of how to get data into their Excel spreadsheet so that they can
get the functionality they need from a program they already have (Microsoft
Excel). Let's face it, you cannot import all of the data you need. Some of it
has to be entered. That's what Quick-XL is all about. It makes the task of data
entry easy and quick.
Briefly, Quick-XL works by allowing the user to define the nature of the columns
of a spreadsheet. Based on that information, Quick-XL creates a data entry
experience for the data in each column with various shortcut keys whose purpose
is to streamline the process of entering data into that column.
As an example, if a given column contains a date, typing a period (.) displays
today's date. Typing a plus (+) adds one day to what is there, a minus (-)
subtracts one day.
Quick-XL has shortcuts of each of the data types it supports. You can find out
more about Quick-XL and download a trial copy by visiting their website:
Quick-XL.com.
There is a slight learning curve. You have to learn all the short-cut keys.
There aren't many of them. The whole program is designed to work using only the
keys of the numeric keypad (+, -, Enter, period), keys adjoining the numeric
keypad (Insert, Delete, Up Arrow, Down Arrow, Left Arrow, Right Arrow) and a
couple of keys on the left side of the keyboard (ESC, TAB, Shift and ALT).
There are special substitute keys for laptop keyboards that don't have a
numeric keypad as well.
Because you keep your hands in one place almost all the time, the time time
required to press a key is just the time needed for your finger to move to the
key. There is virtually no arm movement. It is very ergonomic.
So far, I've only addressed the "Time is money" side of the issue. The "Money is
money" part is the price of Quick-XL. It only costs about $10 per year.
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