Running a business is no minor feat. You’re going to have to focus on all sorts of different areas to experience success. But this is essential to your trade and is what you signed up to when you decided to run things yourself and be the boss!
Of course, it can feel difficult to know where to start out when it comes to running your business as seamlessly as possible with minimal hiccups and errors along the way. But hopefully, some of the information below will be able to help you!
Set KPIs
Your staff need to know what is expected of them and what they are working towards to keep the business running to a high standard. This is where KPIs can come in particularly useful.
Rather than working relatively aimlessly, KPIs can help to give your team direction and purpose. KPI stands for “key performance indicator” and is essentially a goal that you set for your staff.
It helps you to monitor their progress and ensure that they’re working to the standard that you expect of them. A KPI will also ensure that your staff definitely know exactly what is expected of them and allows them to work in the right direction to either meet or surpass their goals.
Of course, you also need to make sure that you are both realistic and responsible when setting these milestones. By setting something unachievable, you will burn staff out and create an inevitable sense of failure, which will result in a negative employee outlook and low levels of staff satisfaction.
By setting them too low, you won’t see your business expand at the rate that you want it to. So, make sure that your KPIs are achievable within the time scale set for them.
KPIs can also see what you need to do to help your staff achieve their goals. Whether this is providing particular software, providing services like those provided by Silverlimes or anything else!
Help Your Team to Bond
Sure, individual brilliance is great and your staff need to be able to work independently as and when is required of them. But teamwork is what will actually keep your business ticking over.
Think of things like a clock. All of the individual cogs need to work together in unison for the entire thing to actually work. So, make sure that you consider a sense of team spirit and collaboration to be essential to your business’ success. Your team bonding will see your business thrive.
Without it, you could see an overly competitive workplace, hostile environments, people not collaborating and projects falling through. If you don’t see your team bonding naturally, you may want to consider carrying out some team building activities.
Not only will these activities help to break the ice between your employees, but it can encourage natural professional relationships between them.
Once your team have spoken and spent time with each other, they will be more likely to work together, asking one another questions, coming up with ideas in conversation and overcoming challenges. Sure, team building may seem awkward or forced at first, but bonds will quickly form.
Manage Staff Happiness
A happy team is a productive team. Of course, you can’t manage your employees’ lives outside of the workplace and there will inevitably be times that your staff face personal struggles that can impact their productivity when they do get into work.
Relationship issues, responsibilities outside of work, unfortunate or sad personal incidents – the list goes on. But what you can control and help with is your staff’s happiness levels within the workplace.
A good way to determine this is by asking staff to complete an anonymous staff satisfaction survey. Think about it. If you ask staff straight up how they feel about the company they are working for, how they get on with their fellow team members and how happy they are in the workplace, you’re relatively unlikely to get a truly honest answer.
Why? Well, they may think negative comments could be deemed attacks on the business and they may then feel that this could put their job at risk. Instead, anonymous surveys will help staff to be more honest and open about what they struggle with, what can be improved and more.
What’s also important is that these surveys are carried out on a relatively regular basis. Remember that working conditions and circumstances can change over time, so it’s important that you keep track of your staff’s happiness regularly to ensure that you can make necessary changes as you go along.
These, of course, are just a few suggestions that could help to keep the cogs of your business turning. They are mainly focused on your staff, as your staff are a huge factor in your business’ success and they are often the individuals who keep everything running in the right direction. Hopefully, some of the tips will come in useful for you!
- DISCLOSURE – This post has been written by an outside source
