Within your day-to-day operations, you undoubtedly have tasks that are relatively small but require unique skills, equipment, or expertise. Handling such tasks in-house is challenging because it may require a larger investment, such as buying software and then acquiring the expertise that goes with it. Alternatively, it may require a specific skill (e.g., knowledge of a certain language).
It is not possible to simply ask your least busy employee to start doing this new task if they lack the necessary skills. The result might be a very long learning curve, or it might backfire entirely if mistakes are made. And, of course, hiring a full-time person just for these occasional tasks is not viable.
How to solve the problem? How to handle these tasks?
Option one: outsource them!
The most obvious way to solve this problem is to outsource these tasks to a third party or several third parties. These could be freelancers: one person can manage your social media, another can respond to client emails in a foreign language, a third person can provide IT support, and so on. They should have the required equipment and expertise available to you as needed.
An outsourcing company such as Broadstone.io Business Support Services can also take on such assignments, with the added benefit of covering a broad range of services and relieving you of the worries of having to replace freelancers who go on holiday or become ill.
Option two: try and involve employees
Employees can be involved in tasks that either require precisely a half-day’s worth of manpower to handle each day, distributed in one chunk, or that allow you to lump two or three different tasks into one position. This assumes that while only one of these tasks requires a special skill, the remainder of the tasks align with the skillset of the first one.
For example, even if you have an excellent graphic artist who can create two new T-shirt designs for your webstore each week, you cannot expect them to handle incoming customer complaints in their remaining time or sort data for your accountant. This is not how skills, talents, and motivations work, obviously. The same issue arises if you need ten T-shirts designed one week but none the following two weeks.
This problem applies whether we are talking about newly hired part-time employees or training the existing ones.
Option three: ignore the task!
Depending on the nature of specific tasks, you might be able to get away with not doing them for a long time. However, there is a reason you have these tasks on your list of to-dos. Handling them and doing so with good quality can contribute to your business by reducing costs, improving customer satisfaction, enhancing your image, increasing revenues, streamlining processes, and so on.
Option four: AI and automation
Fortunately, by 2024, a great deal of tasks can be handled using artificial intelligence. There are caveats to this approach in terms of reliability and legal risks, both related to data protection and AI as a high-risk activity in certain areas, such as HR.
