Updated August, 2024
Too often running a small business feels like chaos, with demands pulling you in multiple directions, constant distractions, and more work that needs to get done than time allows. This can be true for both firm leaders as well as your employees. Yet it is vital to develop a work culture, and personal habits, that prevent mental fatigue and burnout. To be effective in your role, and for your firm to be effective as a team, you need to manage effort to maximize productivity without overburdening anyone on the team.
An even, measured level of effort and expectation would help management and employees alike. It is important to understand that working harder or longer hours doesn't necessarily translate into better business success.
Business Mistakes and How to Prevent Them
The team at BQE works with a lot of architecture and engineering firms and have learned from their mistakes and best practices. To help you and your firm prevent common business mistakes, here are some of the habits that always seem to be present in firms where employees are overworked and unhappy.
1. Checking Email First Thing in the Morning
Unless you want your clients dictating how the rest of your day will be, stop doing this. You need to be in control of your time and how you communicate with people. Set a policy that you will reply to emails within 24 hours, but not immediately upon receipt.
Instead, start your day with creating a list of tasks/projects you want to accomplish. Check yesterday’s list, consolidate them, and add them to your current list. Make sure you put a priority level next to each item. Rank them based on priority and work through the items based on the priority rather than the task size or difficulty.
Morning probably isn't the best time to spend time on emails as they aren't the highest priority item on your task list. Or at least be selective over which emails need your attention now vs can wait to later. We actually recommend dedicating 30 minutes right before or after your lunch break to manage emails, and maybe again at the end of the day, so you can mentally leave work behind as you head home to recharge.
2. Meeting with Project Managers Monthly
Monthly meetings leave too much time between critical discussions. Time during which your employees and managers can astound you with how much got lost in translation initially. And beyond business related decisions, it is important to have a regular pulse on individual's feelings.
Companies that have one on one management meetings once a week have fewer fires to put out and surprises to deal with. If your project managers are ridiculously busy, do 15 minute stand-up meetings in the kitchen if you have to, just to touch base on project updates and personal challenges they are facing. Not doing so will result in delays, confusion and lost revenue.
It is also recommended that your Project Managers meet with their direct reports on a weekly basis. They should keep a pulse on their team, make sure the project is moving forward efficiently and that their people are happy and motivated.
3. Believing There are 8 Hours in a Work Day
Be fair and honest with your expectations. No one will be at their most productive state for 8 hours each day. You aren't and neither will your team. And as a formal management consultant for architecture firms I advised firms to purposefully schedule non billable time for their team each day.
Your staff needs unplanned time to catch up on emails and unforeseen tasks. There is value in scheduling daily team standups or building the weekly 1:1 meetings and other non-billable time into their schedules. In general, I recommend planning at least 1 hour of non-billable time each day.
For example, if you need an engineer to work on a project for 30 hours, schedule her for six hours a day, for five days, instead of eight hours per day for three days with a 6-hour day four. This way, the work will more likely get done in the number of hours assigned as she’ll have planned time to be able to join team events, communicate with clients, and jump on any 11th hour tasks assigned to her. This will make a huge difference in her stress level and quality of work.
4. Setting Annual Goals
You can and should be setting annual goals. But it is advised that you break those down into monthly or even weekly goals that build up to achieve the larger targets. Whether it’s increasing your client base, putting in more billable hours, or decreasing your carbon footprint, create a list of goals and offer incentives for the team to help you achieve them.
Make sure you track progress towards achieving goals in a way that is clear and transparent. This can be done in software, on a whiteboard, or some other tool that the whole team can access. Celebrate successes along the way and in team meetings discuss if you are ahead or behind schedule to achieve the stated goal.
5. Not Partying Enough
Yes, you read that correctly. Many people spend more time with their colleagues than with their family, so you better enjoy it! Making the company a fun place to be for your employees increases productivity, engagement and involvement.
We recommend a once-a-month get-together with all employees. Or if your team works remotely, think of some fun seasonal virtual games or challenges you can do together as a group. Talk with your team to discuss opportunities to add some fun to the workplace. You don't want these to feel forced or "mandated fun." They could be casual meals together, planned site visits to projects in construction, or excursions to cultural events in your city or town.
You could even do team volunteering for causes that reflect your company's values. Be creative and look for new ways to have fun, inspire the team, and impact your community.
6. Using Outdated Business Management Software or Spreadsheets
We’ve all used spreadsheets before and will continue to use them going forward. They’re widely accessible and a great tool for many tasks. But we also all know that they can be a pain to use and make it hard for new team members to know where to look for information.
Not only do they take a lot of time to put together, they can be clunky, difficult to share, and leave so much room for human error. One mistake and the data you are trying to track will no longer be accurate and helpful. Plus often you rely on entering the same data manually into different spreadsheets - a complete waste of time.
Same goes for any outdated business management software. Business management software should make things easy for you while being so up to date that you have an all-in-one platform that takes care of your project management, time tracking, expenses, billing, accounting, and more. If you’re using outdated software that’s slowing you down, or constantly dealing with the headache known as spreadsheets, you’re making a large business mistake right there.
Prevent Business Mistakes with BQE CORE
Now that we've identified some of the common business mistakes firm leaders make, and what you can do to prevent/fix them, let BQE CORE help you with mistake #6. Stop using spreadsheets and business management software that’s slowing you down and start using an all-in-one platform that easily manages your projects for you and saves you and your team time and helps you make more money. BQE CORE provides smart time and expense tracking, project management, accounting/billing, and more. And with our outstanding customer service, we’ll have you set up and ready to start fixing those business mistakes right away.
Don’t believe us? Try a free demo today and see why architects, engineers, and other professional services are raving about our software.
