Posts

Diagnosing Business Problems and Fixing Them in the Most Efficient Way Possible

/in /by

StrategyDriven Business Performance Assessment Program Article |Business Problems|Diagnosing Business Problems and Fixing Them in the Most Efficient Way PossibleBusinesses can encounter a plethora of problems during day-to-day operations. However, they can also be affected by long-term issues that, if left alone for too long, can result in massive profit losses and sharp drops in consumer confidence. As such, it’s extremely important to diagnose these problems as soon as possible so they can be dealt with in the most efficient way.

While this sounds like obvious advice, it’s surprisingly difficult for businesses to optimize their problem-solving process. So to help you out, we’ve prepared this post to help you diagnose issues and fix them in the most efficient way you can.

Identifying the business problem

First, make sure you invest time into identifying the business problems that are affecting your business. This sounds easy, but the reality is that most people are only looking at the symptoms of the problem and the problem itself. For example, people might look at falling profits as the problem itself. But what exactly is causing that problem? Is it because there are competitors who are rising above you? Is it your business model that is outdated? Or is your team to blame for your business’s shortcomings?

In reality, it’s usually a combination of these factors that affects your profits. Sadly, there’s no way to easily identify the problem and solve it. Instead, what you’ll need to do is make use of feedback from employees and look at actionable sets of data to help you make informed decisions. This involves a bit of setup as you need to establish processes that actually record this kind of data. For example, if you believe that your business model is to blame, then you’ll need to pull up statistics that relate to your business processes. This can include sales numbers, your ROI on advertising and promotions, and click-through rates.

Applying the right solution to the problem

In most cases, business problems will have multiple solutions. For example, a broad problem such as falling sales can be fixed in many different ways depending on the root cause. It could involve focusing on customer service, expanding your range of products, or even just advertising more.

Applying the right solution can be tricky because there are many different ways to fix something, hence why it’s important to work with experts such as Jim Thomas of Atlanta. The benefit of hiring a specialist is that they can see your business from an outside perspective. They have a better view of everything because they’re looking from the outside in, and you get a better idea of what you need to do because they can look at your business objectively.

Finding the right solution is tricky, but with the right assistance, you can make it simple and painless. It’s better than trying many different solutions and ultimately failing because you’re inexperienced or unsure of what the root cause of the problem is. Diagnosing and fixing business problems doesn’t need to be difficult, but it does require a bit of investigation and investment.

5 Ways You Can Support Your Employee’s Mental Health

/in /by

StrategyDriven Managing Your People Article |Mental Health|5 Ways You Can Support Your Employee's Mental HealthIt’s so important for any business owner that they have employees who are coming to work every day feeling good about the work they are doing. The people working for you aren’t just your employees; they’re people, and they have lives outside of your business to run. Supporting the mental health of your employees should be one of the most important considerations when you are thinking about the best ways to manage your staff. The better you can support people, the more they will be willing to stay with you and be loyal to your brand.

Mental health isn’t a joke, and whether you are considering asking your human resources team to put a plan together to ensure your employees are happy, or you want to bring on Peter Sandhill for life coaching purposes for each member of the team, you need to know how to do this. Supporting your employee’s mental health is going to make a big difference to their performance, and your profitability and reputation as a result. So, with this in mind, here are some of the most important ways that you can support employee mental health at work.

  1. Ask. The best way to support your staff is to ask what they need. What one member of staff will need wll differ from another, and the more you understand about the people working for you, the better. If you can be candid with your staff and help them to better understand what you can offer, the happier they will be. People who work for you should be able to feel as if they can come to you for help and advice, and if you ask them what they will need the most, they’ll give you all the answers and pathways to help them that you need.
  2. Resources. Identifying the local resources that you can utilize to ensure that you support the mental health of others is important. If you offer your employees health insurance, make sure that it covers counseling or mental health support in their local area. You can even offer duvet days in the workplace. These are three or four days in the year – paid – that your staff can take at any time, no questions asked. These days are on offer as they need them, and it’s often the lifeline people need to know that they have your support.
  3. Self Care. Policies in the workplace that include self-care should be open to your employees to learn about. Encourage your staff to get away from their desks to eat and make sure that no one touches work on the weekends. If you do things like this, people are going to be more inclined to feel happier at work as they know that they have you supporting them.
  4. Workloads. It’s important that – as an employer – you stay on top of how much work your employees are actually doing. This means ensuring that you are monitoring when they are doing too much, rather than too little. When your employees are overloaded, they don’t work well. It’s not a good idea to give your team too much work, as all that will do is bury them in a load of stress that they can’t get back out of.Create Culture. You want everyone in your business to feel safe, able to ask questions, able to discuss issues and feel safe. Every single business is different, so work out what will work for your business and go from there!

Analytics Are a Must for Business Success

/in /by

StrategyDriven Organizational Performance Measures Article |Analytics|Analytics Are a Must for Business SuccessBusiness analytics is a process in which businesses improve their operations by using statistical models to analyze data. They compare historical and current data and try to make adjustments where applicable to improve future performance. Business analytics’ first usage was in the late 19th century but did not become standard practice until the 1960s.

Analytics Gives Companies an Edge

Once companies really began to use business analytics, they quickly developed an edge over the competition. There has always been a level of adaptation that companies have made to keep competitive. However, the use of analytics gave companies the ability to look deeper into the data and discover more useful information to improve business.

Gathering statistics and analyzing them to try to find useful information only works if you are collecting the right statistics. It is easy to get bogged down in the wrong information and draw false conclusions from statistical analysis. Any data set taken out of context is likely to lead analysts down a false path. All of the relevant information must be gathered and compared in order for analytics to truly be useful.

New Coke Was Delicious… And Terrible

Gathering a data set in a vacuum can lead to tremendous business blunders. Take one of the biggest marketing failures of all time: New Coke. The blind taste tests conducted by both Pepsi and Coke showed that the majority of people preferred the taste of Pepsi to the taste of Coke.

Then after developing a new formula, Coke ran over 200,000 taste tests. The results showed definitively, that people preferred the flavor of New Coke to both that of old Coke and Pepsi. Then we all know what happened. Consumers hated New Coke and demanded a return of their original beverage. After three months, Coca-Cola Classic made a return, and everyone was happy.

The researchers did not gather all of the relevant information. One of the key pieces of information they overlooked was that people don’t typically only drink a couple of sips of a cola. They usually drink a can or a bottle. Some people drink several cans a day. For many, the sweeter taste of New Coke was not as palatable in large quantities as the original.

They also didn’t gather information about why people drank Coke. Pepsi was working very hard to be the “cool cola”, aiming at taking the youth market. Many of the people who stuck with Coke were about brand loyalty and nostalgia. They liked the beverage they had and were not looking for a change.

Had Coke done a proper analysis of the statistics, they would have looked at who was drinking Coke and why. By doing so, they would not have made such a mistake. Either they would have scrapped the idea of New Coke altogether or offered it as an additional beverage rather than an alternative.

Instead of replacing Coke, if they had continued to sell Coke Classic, but also offered “Coke Youth” to try to pull back some of the consumers they had lost to Pepsi, maybe people would still be drinking Coke Youth today, right alongside Coke Classic.

Sports Analytics

Despite an abundance of usable statistical information, it took a while for sports to follow in the footsteps of business in the use of analytics. Once they started using analytics to improve individual and team performance, however, they began to quickly perfect its usage.

While they may look big, sports organizations are relatively small businesses. Because of this, their analytics departments aren’t nearly as big as big banks or global retailers. As a result, they have to outsource a lot of their analytical needs. This has led to the creation of many sports analytics companies. The use of football analytics software enables these companies to provide needed information to clubs across the league.

One of the best usages of analytics that sports organizations have used, which businesses could greatly benefit from, is the effect of individual performance upon the team. Sports teams are able to assess the potential contributions of players beyond their individual statistics. Some players don’t put up the most impressive numbers but are able to elevate the level of play of those around them.

Some team members, whether in sports or business, are key to the success of the group. They are not valuable because they shine themselves, but because they help everyone around them to impress. Proper use of analytics can help businesses to make these determinations and so much more. The data is all there. It simply needs to be gathered and correctly analyzed in order for your business to thrive.

What’s the Difference Between Influencer Marketing and Brand Advocacy?

/in /by

StrategyDriven Marketing and Sales Article | Influencer Marketing|What’s the Difference Between Influencer Marketing and Brand Advocacy?The terms influencer and advocate often get thrown together and some may think that they’re interchangeable. But they aren’t. Both roles are very different, and they both have different goals and intentions. Simply put, influencers are in it for themselves while advocates work for you. Working with both could help, but there are cases when only an advocate could help, and vice versa. Let’s take an in-depth look at the differences between the two and which one you should go for.

What is Influencer Marketing Anyway?

When someone uses influencer marketing, it means that they’re partnering up with someone who already has a sizable audience. We use the term partnering up loosely since the influencer isn’t obligated to do anything but mention your product or service. They have no obligation to like it. At this point, this would be an advertisement. They could be required to do some product placement, however, or make a review in the format of your choice.

Evidently, you have to choose influencers who you think will appreciate your product or brand and will want to sing its praises. This is where their role becomes similar to advocates. But it isn’t guaranteed that they will like your product and it could eventually backfire if they have serious gripes with it.

What are Brand Advocates?

Brand advocates are not workers. Instead, they are clients that are so appreciative of what you do that they will be willing to sell your product or services to others unsolicited. It’s a modern version of word-of-mouth marketing.
What makes brand advocates so powerful is social proof. Research has shown that people are more likely to make purchase decisions after recommendations from people in their social circle. Advocates become opinion leaders within their group and can help you get referrals, introduce new products, boost interest for product launches, or even get directly involved in the research and development stage.

What About Brand Ambassadors?

This is also a term that gets conflated with influencers and advocates, but ambassadors are different. Unlike influencers, it is their job to promote your brand. However, unlike advocates, ambassadors will be paid for their work. Ambassadors can drive efforts and help you reach objectives with more predictability, but campaigns have to be executed properly to get results.

Can Ambassadors and Advocates Work Together?

Of course! Actually, this is when they become more powerful. Advocates can be great content creators, and if you can find a way for ambassadors to collect, manage, and re-use this content in your social media campaigns, then you will be able to harness the power of both. Brand ambassador management software streamlines social content development and sharing and will allow you to gather content from a network of advocates, ambassadors, and even employees to boost engagement and traction for your brand across all platforms.

Influencers, ambassadors, and advocates play very different roles. This doesn’t mean, however, that they can’t complement each other, so try to see where each could help.

Designing a Home Office That Aids Your Professional Development

/in /by

StrategyDriven Professional Development Article |Home Office|Designing a Home Office That Aids Your Professional DevelopmentOver the past year, many professionals within business, management, and analytics – and, indeed, across many other sectors, too – have found themselves working from home on a more regular basis. This has led to a huge shift in the ways in which staff are able to communicate and interact with one another, in addition to affecting the very nature of their work.

Inquiring about an aspect of a document you’re uncertain about, querying decisions, and monitoring the effectiveness of staff have all been rendered much more difficult, while working from home has become the norm.

This new way of working limits human-to-human interaction, making it difficult to observe and question exemplary staff to help your own development, and making feedback a much lengthier process. However, as remote working seems to be becoming the norm in large corporations such as Spotify and BP – at least for part of the working week – it makes sense to start considering the ways in which working from home can help aid your development.

In this article, we discuss office set-ups and designs that are conducive to focused work patterns and that can help enhance your professional development even while you’re not sat in the office.

Finding the Perfect Spot

Many workers underestimate the benefits of a designated space within the home that is entirely dedicated to the production of work. The key is identifying a space within your home that has a surface you can work at (preferably a desk or a table), lots of natural light, is not affected by noise as much as other areas of the house, and that has all the equipment you will need. Ideally, the room you choose requires a door that you can close, to avoid interruptions from pets or children when on conference calls, and block out any distracting noises throughout the day.

A Comfortable Space

While you obviously would prefer to avoid creating a space that is too comfortable and disrupts your working frame of mind, you also need an area that doesn’t distract you from your focus – heightened feelings of discomfort can prevent you from concentrating as effectively as you would otherwise.

A key element of this is the maintenance of the room temperature. Too cold, and your digits will stiffen and your brain will work slower, slowing your progress down and inhibiting your thinking and problem-solving skills; too hot, and you’ll become lethargic and spend a vast proportion of your time trying to cool yourself down. Investing in a variable heating center for your home office could make all the difference! Refurbished PTACs from ptac4less.com/ are perfect for room renovations or additions. They allow you to control the temperature of your working space to make it optimal for you.

Additionally, investing in ergonomically designed seating will do wonders for your posture, enabling you to sit in an upright position comfortably and type at the same time, while cushioning your lower back. Combined with a raised, padded mousepad and a screen that can be adjusted for your comfort, this will allow you to focus entirely on your work output.

Maintaining Calm

An often-underestimated aspect of a home office is the requirement for calm. Busy rooms with lots of visual and auditory distractions can cause sensory overload and make it more difficult to focus on your work. A room painted in neutral colors is preferable, as busy patterns and bright, popping colors again can disrupt your thinking process and add to feelings of stress. Instead, it would be beneficial to invest in calming artwork, depicting soft seaside or country scenes, or paintings with soft blues and greens. This also means that you have a professional-looking space for those inevitable Zoom meetings and conferences!

If you are the type of person that benefits from music when working, curating a playlist of instrumental music and themes is generally best. Studies have demonstrated in the past that classical music is particularly conducive to focus and concentration.

Keeping plants and fish has also been suggested as a way of invoking calm in a space; creating your own aquarium (well-researched, of course) would not only add to a relaxing yet focused atmosphere, but they also provide a calming visual that you can use to stimulate ideas and configure solutions.

Many believe that working from home has negatively impacted the professional development of staff, particularly those transferring from other sectors or who are just starting out in their career. However, there are ways of designing your home office set up in such a way that you are not only able to complete your work effectively, but that enables you to flourish.