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Harmony vs Chaos: Keep Employees on the Same Page

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StrategyDriven Talent Management Article
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Making sure everyone in your business is on the page shouldn’t be seen as mere courtesy. When everyone is on the same page, then it becomes much easier for business to go smoothly! You want everyone working in some sort of harmony, in order to fight off the chaos that big business projects can often bring.

Employees are your strongest asset, but you’re doing them a disservice if communication and collaboration isn’t that strong in your business. Here are a few tips you should keep in mind.

Contribution

If employees don’t feel all that involved in certain aspects of the business, then it’s going to be more difficult for them to really engage as deeply as you want them to. One of the best ways to encourage professional harmony in the workplace is to get more employees involved in the planning process of a particular project, or even in its inception. Of course, you have to balance this with the risk of having too many cooks in the kitchen – this approach may stretch out the planning process. It could benefit the project in the long run, though.

Collaboration

The easier it is to collaborate, the more people you’re going to get on the same page. Thankfully, there’s a bunch of software and web applications you can use to facilitate this. SharePoint, a Microsoft Office feature, is currently gaining popularity in this area. It’s relatively new to many people, however, so consider working with a consultancy business such as HingePoint to help people get used to things. There’s also suites such as Google Drive, communication programs such as Skype and Google Hangouts, and project management web apps such as Trello and Basecamp that are all recommended.

StrategyDriven Talent Management Article
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Documentation

Whether it be documents detailing the goals of the project or notes taken from meetings, keeping strong documentation of the project is pretty essential. When people get a little lost, they can refer to a central piece of information – such as a project bible – to help them get back on track and see what the particular aims and expectations are. This is also very useful for instances in which employees are late, have to take a sick day, and return from vacation. You should make sure that these documents are kept up-to-date, too; they shouldn’t be static texts. After all, things are probably going to change a few times on a given project!

Sociability

A lot of business owners see encouraging sociability to be something quite peripheral to work. They want to keep things friendly in the office, though they also know that these good vibes can also increase satisfaction, which helps drive productivity and focus. But encouraging sociability really helps in a very direct way when it comes to people being on the same page at the workplace. When bonds grow between employees, they don’t only talk about private or trivial matters – they also begin to talk about work more frankly, and become more enthusiastic to offer each other help. So arranging after-work social events, as well as allowing employees a bit of space to talk casually from time to time, can help your business more than you might think.

Giving Your Business The Promotion It Needs

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StrategyDriven Marketing and Sales Article
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When we start a business, we are often clueless to the types of promotion that it actually needs. In this day and age, we are living in a digital world. With this, most of the focus is on promotion via means that we can access through our computers, tablets and smartphones. This isn’t to say that that’s not a good idea – more than half of the world are connected to the internet, and it’s the biggest resource that we’ve ever had in our whole history which is open to getting ourselves out there and communicating with our target demographic. So are we missing other options?

Social Media

Although on the rise, social media is not utilised as much as it could or should be. This is a vital tool in business promotion, especially as certain platforms such as Facebook and Twitter have invested so much into making it compatible for businesses – especially small businesses. Their data analytics can prove to be such a useful tool when assessing who your posts are reaching, where in the world they’re reaching and how many people are actually seeing them. You can pay to promote the posts that you’re putting up so you could have the potential of reaching a global audience. You can’t get much better than that. Make sure that you are clued up on the rules of business for each platform that you are using – they are all very different in terms of how they are meant to be used. For example, if you put out one post a day on Facebook, this could be seen as being spammy. Put out one post a day on Twitter and it’ll be history and off people’s feeds in as little as 4 minutes.

Don’t Forget Tradition – Consider The Past

Just because this is the rise of the age of technology doesn’t mean that we solely have to rely on that in order to get our brand message seen. Think about all of the traditional methods that people used back when computers weren’t in wide circulation. Newspapers and magazines are still going round, as are leaflets. Places such as Blue Bee Printing are still able to provide customers with die-cut magnets to hand out for promotional purposes – bumper magnets are still in use, as when will people ever stop driving cars? Not any time soon, that’s for sure. The more that you think outside of the box and consider what people are still going to go for are ways that you can promote your business without really trying. Handing out little things for free such as key rings, mugs and other trinkets that people can utilise within their home with a little bit of company branding on it ensures that you will always be the first port of call should they need you for the particular thing that you can provide. Letting your customers spread the branding for you is one of the best things that you can do – and that they can unknowingly do for you.

Making More of What You Have: Optimise Your Business in These Ways to Achieve More

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Every business has its limitations, so yours shouldn’t get you down. Instead, you just need to make the most of what you do have, and that’s called optimisation. It’s all about getting more out of your business without having to spend more money or live beyond your means. It’s about improvement without any of the risky unsustainability that can so often come with it. Here are some top ways to achieve that kind of business optimisation.

Adopt a Customer-Centric Approach

First of all, you should definitely try to adopt an approach to business that is a lot more customer-centric. If you can do that, your business will be sure to go much further than ever before, and that can only be a good thing. Some business owners forget that everything they do has to be geared towards customers. If they don’t like what you’re offering and don’t buy what you’re selling, then nothing else really matters at all. By taking a customer-centric approach, you can maximise and optimise your business’s appeal to customers and, ideally, make more sales.

StrategyDriven Marketing and Sales Article
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Achieve Growth Through Continual Training

Continual training is vital, and it’s something that any business can focus on. It’s a great way to improve your team and get more out of the people you employ. It allows you to maximise their talents and capabilities, and this should lead to further growth for your business. If you allow your employees to stagnate, they will never improve and never be able to push your business on in the ways you might want them to. You have no right to keep expecting more from your people if you are not willing to offer them the training that allows them to improve.

Get Something Out of Those Unpaid Invoices

Lots of companies find that they end up with a backlog of invoices that haven’t been paid. Clearly, this is not an ideal situation to be in for your company. But rather than waiting and waiting for payments, you can make the most of those unpaid invoices. It could improve your cash flow situation and help your business to survive any tough financial times. Accounts receivable financing allows you to get more from companies that buy up these unpaid invoices. It’s something that is definitely worth considering if you need the cash quickly.

StrategyDriven Marketing and Sales Article
Photo courtesy of Pixabay

Create Better Balance in Your Team

By creating better balance in your team, you can get more out of that group as a whole. Balance is one of the most underrated attributes when it comes to group dynamics in the office. If you have too many people who are good at one thing and not enough people who are good at another, the team will be unbalanced. This might not sound like such a big deal, but it can have a pretty big impact on your business and how it’s run. You will sooner or later find that you can’t be as efficient nor as productive as you would like if you don’t fix this.

StrategyDriven Marketing and Sales Article
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The Importance of Effective Communication Within Your Business

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Picture this scenario; you have an employee on their way to a business meeting in Dubai. He’s currently in the taxi on his way to the airport, but sadly his work phone is out of battery and you have no way to contact him about the cancelled deal. He boards the plane, heads off to Dubai, and it’s only once he lands that he gets your message about the deal being cancelled.

StrategyDriven Business Communications Article
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This example highlights just one of the many uses of an effective communications system. The ability to contact the people you need to in an urgent manner is incredibly important due to how time-consuming and money-wasting a delay in communications can be. Yet, unfortunately, there is only so much you can do with traditional systems such as emailing and messaging. If there are other business emergencies, such as a fire breaking out at the office or your business premises being burgled, then you need a quick and swift way to notify everyone within your company because every second counts.

Emergency Notifications System

Let’s pretend one of your employees has come into work early. He’s the first one at the office and he enters the premises to find that your entire office has been trashed, the computers have been stolen and the security system smashed into pieces. With no way to contact everyone in a short time span, the employee isn’t a hundred percent sure what he should do. This is just one of the many emergency notification use cases. Giving your employees the ability to make a company-wide emergency notification is a great way to alert all of the staff about a pressing issue that needs to be sorted out immediately. Instead of relying on a chain of command that they have to climb up for their message to reach someone, they can simply tell everyone in the business with a simple message.

StrategyDriven Business Communications Article
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Building Team Efficiency

If your team are able to easily contact each other with an effective communications system, then it helps to make the team more efficient. Whether there’s an important change that needs to be made or some hardware that broke which was critical to their project, everyone in the team needs to know so that they can adjust their working schedule to either fix the hardware, prepare a replacement or work around it. If your team is unable to communicate effectively, it will lead to delays, disputes and other problems that are going to slow down your business.

Employee Management

Managers are usually quite effective at communicating with their employees, but there are going to be times when having social skills isn’t enough and you need software or technology to improve the way a manager contacts an employee. For instance, if there’s an easy way for your senior members to keep a track of their team members and record their progress, then it makes your business more productive. By having your managers communicate effectively and inform staff of their daily tasks, goals and issues, it creates a workplace that runs smoothly.

StrategyDriven Business Communications Article
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The Power of Professional Presentation

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StrategyDriven Article, The Power Of Professional Presentation

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As a new or growing business, it can be a struggle to compete with larger businesses. In some areas, like customer base and advertising, your budget will simply be too small to compete. But, your presentation can always be improved. This is one area that you have the power to control almost entirely.

Your presentation is everything that your customer lays their eyes upon. Every single document, webpage, advert, and piece of packaging that is seen must be professional. The same goes for your storefront, staff, and customer communications. These areas can be built to rival big companies, without too much difficulty. First, you just need a strong brand. With decent branding, customers will instantly recognise your business. If your logo is good and looks professionally designed, it will help customers to trust you.

Your first real challenge is your website. Developing a website that looks unique can be very difficult. Services like Wix and Squarespace promise the ability to build a beautiful website, at a very low cost. Now, they aren’t lying. Their sites can look really good, and they’re easy to make. But, it’s very easy to see when a website has been made with one of these tools. And, unfortunately, that makes it look unprofessional. Thankfully, getting your hands on a web developer is nice and easy, nowadays. You can find loads of freelance workers on websites like Freelancer.com and Upwork. You just have to give them a brief for the website and pay them when the job is complete. It’s much cheaper than using a large company to design the website for you. But, it’s a lot better than using a website builder yourself. Alternatively, you can spend some time to learn some web development and build a website for yourself.

Next, you need to think about the paperwork and packaging your customers see. Anything like this should be tastefully branded and made to a professional standard. Packaging design is a skilled trade. It isn’t easy to knock a piece of packaging together yourself. Instead, it’s worth investing a little bit of money in an agency to do it for you. This work isn’t too expensive to have done, and it will result in a much better result than most people’s own work. It helps with today’s modern consumers if you use environmentally friendly packaging where you can. It makes people feel like they’re doing their part if you give them a chance to source their goods responsibly.

If you have a physical store or any other place that customers might visit, it should be up to scratch as well. A lot of modern shop fitting has gone minimalist in it’s approach. This is a great benefit for budget operations, as it allows you to create something that looks good from very little. Second-hand building equipment like scaffolding and wood can create a unique and homely store. Alongside the shop fitting, you should also have plenty of branding around your store. Having a wall with your logo on it is a great idea. It shows your customers who you are whenever they’re in your store. Your physical presence in-store extends to merchandise as well. If your staff use coffee mugs or pens, they should be branded with your logo. And, if your staff wear uniforms, they should be branded as well.

This brings us onto your staff. Alongside their uniforms, your staff should have some training. They should be taught how to talk in a professional manner and taught what to do in conflict situations. Remaining calm is very important in the service industry. If customers are angry, you have to remain cool and treat them like an adult. This can be hard for new staff. So, it’s important that you make sure that your staff know exactly what to do in these situations. All of your staff should understand the policies that affect your customers, as well. They should be able to answer questions and get answers as fast as possible.

Sometimes, businesses are too small to hire staff. But, you still need to be able to talk to your customers when things go wrong. Customers won’t trust a mobile or personal phone number. So, it’s unprofessional to have them listed for your company. It’s also hard to gain trust from some customers if you don’t give out a number at all. So, it’s important that you have this area covered. Instead of hiring a new staff member, you can pay someone else to do the work for you. For instance, to get help with your call answering needs visit this business website. Companies like this offer customised call answering and call redirection from a business number to a mobile phone. These tools will give you everything you need to run a budget call center that still feels professional.

Going back to your website, you can eliminate many of your customer queries through a frequently asked questions page on your website. This sort of self-service customer service makes it easier and faster for your customers to get answers. If they are trying to find delivery information, for example, they might not order if they have to call you for it. If it’s easily accessible on the website, though, it could be a different story. People in the modern age expect their information to be fast and easy to access. So, it’s a good idea to give it to them the best you can.

Your branding and appearance represent your company. If you don’t look professional; a lot of customers will simply ignore you. Or, if you make mistakes, you could lose customers because they don’t trust you. Of course, it’s a delicate balance between cost and quality. Sometimes, it can be better to go for cheaper options and have a more homemade approach. But, at other times, it can be better to be as professional as possible.

Hopefully, this will inspire you to build your business up to new heights of professionalism. It will help your business to grow and will stop you from facing certain challenges in the future. Remember; it’s important to do research for any part of your business. So, make sure you know what you’re doing before making any changes.