When was the last time that you were faced with a situation where you found yourself saying “I should have…”?  This may have happened when an irate client who had yet to receive his promised delivery confronted you or when you needed  to source a new supplier and couldn’t find the appropriate business card buried in the stacks of cards collected over the past year.  By the time these types of issues hit your radar, it is too late…. the need for additional follow-up or a new system for managing data should have been anticipated long before these situations arose.

As much as we would like to take control of all aspects of our businesses, it is just not humanly possible for us to do so. There are only a set number of hours in each day and as we all know, though tend to forget, we need to maintain some balance between our working lives and personal lives.  We can, however, instill the concept of thinking and acting proactively in our work environment.  And, if this is coupled with good organizational skills, the level of productivity and efficiency amongst all staff members will increase as well.  By doing so, we can create an environment that generates positive energy and ultimately is less stressful for all.

To begin with, training both staff and management to adapt a more proactive mindset is key.

• Train Staff.   If we teach each member of our staff to anticipate the questions that will be posed to them related to all areas of their responsibility from the very simplest of tasks to the most complex, they will find that decisions can be made faster, potential problems can be averted, and best of all the recognition for “knowing the answer” can be extremely rewarding. In order to be successful at adapting this approach, each staff member will need to assess the task at hand, determine the ultimate objective, and compile a list of all information to be gathered.  Organizing the information gathering process will reduce the number of calls, e-mails, or meetings that will be needed to address the issue thus allowing time to tackle other tasks and projects on the to-do list.

• Train Management.  Members of the management team need to make the time to ensure that the appropriate filing systems, databases and other resource capturing processes are established so that information is accessible when needed.  It is very easy to get caught up in the day-to-day activities of running the business  and lose sight of the necessity to proactively address these types of issues. However if they have been tackled, time that would have otherwise been spent trying to locate the promotional material collected at the last industry conference,  or a networking contact’s business card, can now be devoted to a more productive task like increasing sales.

By anticipating what information will be needed, we are ultimately working smarter which in turn translates to completing the task faster and moving on to the next item which needs to be addressed or …maybe even leaving the office at a reasonable hour.