Why Inefficiency is Your Organization’s Number One Enemy

When many business leaders think about the major problems in their business they might consider cash flow, creativity, attracting talent or even staff retention as the things that are holding them back. Sometimes for organizations it’s these eye-catching and immediately apparent issues that are the major focus.

However, there’s another enemy inside your company, and for growing businesses or companies scaling up with much of their focus elsewhere, gaps in their security can quickly begin to widen. It isn’t as obvious as some of the problems mentioned above, but it can cause just as much damage to the ability of the business to be successful - if not more. The name of this problem is inefficiency, and it affects virtually every single company.

Inefficiency can take multiple forms. Outdated systems and machinery can make you inefficient, so can legacy processes. Lack of staff training can also present problems, as can a failure to embrace automation. Unpredictable crises can expose a business’ vulnerability that criminals are ever-ready to exploit. This might stem from a weakened economy, either nationally or globally as well as any number of unprecedented world events.

In this article, we’ll take a look at why inefficiency should be considered the number one enemy to your business, as well as considering exactly what you can do about it.

Inefficiency can undermine your security

When you think about inefficiency in your business, you might not consider that it could be having an impact on your overall security and challenge your employees in a number of ways from the leadership level down. However, inefficiency in a department can necessarily have a knock-on effect that can result in major issues for your security practice. This is especially true with regards to cybersecurity.

In many businesses, cybersecurity practice is left to the IT team to deal with. This is all well and good in principle but if your IT is struggling with inefficiency, it can lead to key aspects of cybersecurity being missed. For example, keeping software and applications updated is a key part of maintaining strong defences against cybercrime. But if the team has run out of time due to inefficiency, it can be a huge problem.

A waste of employees’ time

One of the key problems relating to inefficiency for businesses is the fact that it can be such a burden on staff time. For a business of any size to be successful, it needs to ensure that its staff have the time available to do the work that they need to complete. When tasks aren’t as efficient as they could be, it’s a massive drain on their available time.

In one survey it was discovered that on average 26% of a worker’s day ‘will be wasted on avoidable administrative chores, unnecessary tasks and outdated ways of working’. When every single member of staff is losing a quarter of their day to tasks that could be made more efficient, it’s easy to see that time is being wasted.

To overcome this issue, you need to think about your current systems and processes. Do they allow your staff to work quickly and be as productive as possible? If you want to get a really valuable insight into this area, it’s a good idea to speak directly with the staff involved.

Adapt security measures to modern digital spaces

In today’s modern workplace, the daily work/life patterns of employees have evolved considerably with unique remote, hybrid and more flexible ways of conducting business. This shape-shifting of our working lives has created new challenges within our digital work spaces, but also presenting new and different challenges to a company’s security that businesses need to recognize, be alert and adapt to, tightening up areas such as mobile devices and laptops that come and go with their more mobile employees.

Remember, it’s your employees who do their job every day, and they can understand the areas that slow them down.

Keeps staff from key tasks

Remember that if staff are finding that their time is being taken up by inefficient tasks, it’s actually taking them away from other things that they could be doing. Perhaps one of the most overlooked aspects of inefficiency is that it can have a real lasting and negative impact on the tasks that simply don’t get done, rather than just the tasks that are slower.

When business critical work simply isn’t getting done because there isn’t the time for it, you know that you have a problem with inefficiency. These tasks are the ones that make the business money, so it can be costing the company a huge amount.

How to overcome inefficiency

Inefficiency can be a huge burden on businesses of any size. For larger organizations, inefficiency builds up throughout the company and costs a significant amount of money. For smaller but growing companies it can have a direct impact on everything they do and can get in the way of growth. Perhaps the polar opposite of ‘inefficiency’ is ‘opportunity’, and in a business sense anything that prevents your business strategies from becoming stale is a positive. Look out for new areas and opportunities for business growth and consider innovative and on-trend solutions that your company will benefit from investing in.