As a business owner, the way you run your company speaks volumes about you. There are numerous paths to success, but with the workforce’s attitudes evolving and new generations rejecting outdated practices, it’s crucial to adapt. How can you ensure your business not only meets performance targets but also embraces and satisfies the expectations of the incoming workforce?
Much like with anything, changes need to be made from the top, and everyone needs to be on board with cultivating an efficient workforce and ensuring that the business is doing what it set out to do and is doing well, respectfully and is not only a success financially but also has a thriving company culture, customer service, and catapults you to the top of the list of the best companies to work for.
Identify What Isn’t Working
Running a successful business isn’t just about focusing on the good parts. It’s about being proactive and identifying areas that need improvement. By recognizing specific parts that are running well and excelling, you can empower yourself to address the areas that are falling below standard, making your business more efficient and effective.
Are you experiencing a high staff turnover, and staff are struggling to increase their workloads due to you not replacing them? Or are you neglecting training? Are you missing a toxic work environment, sending out mixed signals? It’s crucial to ask everyone involved for feedback on what isn’t working within the company. This not only makes your workforce feel heard and appreciated but also provides valuable insights for improvement.
Start with the most urgent issues first, making small, gradual changes. This approach ensures you don’t overwhelm your employees and disrupt the workflow. As you adapt to these changes, gradually introduce more until you reach the desired level. Remember, being open to suggestions and inputs from those carrying out the work is essential. This inclusivity makes your workforce feel valued and fosters a better understanding of the business’s reality.
Integrate Technology
Technological advances have revolutionized the business landscape, and these days, there is literally no excuse for not integrating technology into your business. If you aren’t, then you’re doing yourself a disservice. Look at the options available for your business, be it Sling employee scheduling software, a CRM, automation for carrying out repetitive mundane tasks, or even social media scheduling to help you with your marketing; whatever is on the table, look at how it can benefit your business, the ways in which you can utilize it and the impact it can have.
The more tasks you can take care of by technology, the easier it will be to delegate other tasks and see improvements across the board.
Delegate Effectively
Realistically, you can’t manage everything, nor should you. To maximize your business’s potential and ensure it operates effectively, you must master the art of delegation. This means entrusting others with tasks and giving them the autonomy to complete them as required.
Effective delegation means you need to know your entire team’s strengths and weaknesses, skills, relevant qualifications, and stand-out points. From here, you can redistribute tasks to focus on these strengths and improve output. You can delegate tasks to the most competant of employees with a clear directive, expected result, and timeframe so they can move forward without needing to check back or you constantly following up to check it’s being done right.
Set out your directions, agree on follow-up points and check-ins, keep updated on progress, and celebrate achievements from successful delegations. The more you can rely on fathers around you, the better your business will be.
Improve Customer Service
If you want your company to be the best it can be, it goes without saying that you need to improve your customer service efforts all the time. Request feedback, look for trends in data, and identify what is and isn’t working so well for your customers.
The more you know about your current performance and satisfaction levels, the easier it will be to make the required changes. One survey by Hubspot found that customer service representatives noticed that in 79% of teams, the customer knew more than them. This doesn’t give the customer much confidence in your staff’s ability and can be instrumental in lower sales or not hitting targets.
Empower your employees with the skills they need to do their jobs and provide extensive training in the range of scenarios they can use in the world. Give them the tools, knowledge and equipment to excel at their job roles and elevate what they do.
On top of this, you need to take a more holistic view of the customer experience because it doesn’t always start or end with a point of contact with staff members. The customer experience begins well before this. It can be your social media channels, website, storefront, or word of mouth from existing or previous customers. And if this view is not favorable, then you won’t win any new customers or even retain existing ones.
Look at your company from the customer’s point of view and see what they see, then you need to work through the experience with them, identifying issues or problems you have found and looking at how you can make things better and easier for them so they are supported at each contact point with your company.
Leverage Data
Data is king when it comes to improving what or so, yet a massive 80% of businesses are unaware of the volume and type of data they hold and have no idea how to harness it or even use it. Whether you use software to collect and correlate data for your use, or have data scientists on hand to help you understand the results, you need to focus on finding out everything there is to know about everything related to your company.
The more you know, the more you can do. Data allows you to personalize the customer experience, identify buying patterns and behavior trends, uncover new target groups, opportunities for growth and expansion, new ideas for R&D, and so much more.
Use the data to drive your decisions, helping you get the results you need without making all of them stakes along the way; the easier it is to target the right people in the right way, the more value you can offer.
Offer Value
Following on nicely from the last point, you need to offer customers something of value they don’t get anywhere else. What this value is can depend on what you do and how you do it, but it needs to be unique to you. And in a world where everything seems to be in abundance, you need to stand out. It might be that you run a bar and you offer a live music experience that no other bar in your area can offer, or your restaurant offers exceptional family meal deals to entice busy parents in for meal items, or you might simply offer outstanding customer service so people choose you over competitors because you make them feel better and more valued. It doesn’t need to be anything more than one thing you do well that others don’t offer as long as it pulls people to you.
Making your business the best it can be means you need to dig deep and look at all the working parts of your business to identify failings, inefficiencies, and opportunities for growth and development. From here, you can work in the areas you need to support growth and sustainability.
