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The Secrets to Building a Wildly Profitable Organization

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StrategyDriven Managing Your People Article |Profitable Organization|The Secrets to Building a Wildly Profitable OrganizationIt’s no secret that every CEO and executive leader wants a profitable organization, but reaching that goal may seem elusive. With companies going through high turnover rates, you might wonder what causes some leaders to struggle with building their organizations.

I’ve witnessed highly intelligent CEOs start companies with excellent ideas. Some would make a great start but flounder around and not really gain the momentum of success. At the same time, others with similar skills and intellect would take off like a rocket and be wildly successful.

What was the difference between the two? Was it just “luck?” Was it the “timing?” Was it “location?”

No! It all boiled down to the fact that one CEO knew how to create and leverage a talent-centric organization (TCO).

You can have the same success with your company by learning these five secrets to building a wildly profitable organization (hint: they all build a TCO, too).

Create an Amazing Work Environment

Let’s start with the basics that many CEOs may overlook. You must have an amazing work environment. You need a place that attracts talent and makes them want to be at work. Maybe you already have this. If not, you need to find out why. What is in the way of the company being a place where employees love to work? Then, create an amazing work environment that draws in and retains top talent.

When you talk to potential candidates or new hires, the enthusiasm will shine through if you believe the company is a great place to work. Others will feel it and buy into your sales pitch.

Have a Clearly Defined Workplace Culture

The workplace culture is how things are done within the organization. Culture is like a company’s brand image. It consists of its vision (where they are headed, its goals) and its mission (how it will get there, the strategy).

When the culture is well-defined, it gives the company character and purpose. It provides a sense of calm and organization. Some leaders may not think culture and vision are that important. So, they come up with a vision statement that doesn’t indicate who the company is.

Over time, it will be evident that the culture is haphazard when it changes with the circumstances. You don’t want to be all over the place with company values and vision. Instead, think it through carefully; then establish what culture is and put it in place across the board.


Bring Talent On Board That Aligns With Company Culture/Vision

Once you know what your company is all about, you’re ready to focus on the best talent since you have its culture and vision spelled out. The best talent doesn’t necessarily mean that person with the most skills and experience. You want to ensure you bring people on board who align with the company’s culture and vision.

Not every person will be the right fit for your culture, and that’s ok. Don’t try to make your culture work for everyone. Establish what your culture is, then recruit talent that matches it. You’ll find much less turnover when you find talent that is an ideal fit for your company.

Encourage Employee Feedback and Communication

Nurture an environment of employee feedback. You don’t want to stifle communication from your employees. Their thoughts, opinions, and perspectives are highly valuable to CEOs.

Employees need to feel that they can speak up (respectfully) without fear of reprisal. This cultivates transparency and open dialogue that can be helpful for CEOs. Remember, they are not dealing with the same things the employees are, or if they are, it is from a different vantage point. SoThis enables them, they can to glean information about changes they may need to make or as well as areas that are working well.

Invest in Your Talent with Development and Training Opportunities

Once you find talent that is aligned with and ideally suited to the company culture, you want to develop their skills and abilities. Provide them with development and training opportunities. Most people thrive on challenges and learning new things and are bored when there is a lack of stimuli.

Go ahead and give your employees the chance to move beyond their comfort zone and excel. You will be doing yourself a favor, too, because you are training the lower-level talent to take over higher positions as they become available. In other words, you are training to retain.

As you provide team coaching and leadership development opportunities (where appropriate), you create the building blocks of a wildly successful organization.

About the Author

StrategyDriven Expert Contributor | Carol SchultzCarol Schultz, founder and CEO of Vertical Elevation, is a talent equity and leadership advisory expert with 30 years in the business. She’s helped hundreds of companies transform their organizations and create sustainable, talent-centric cultures that run at maximum efficiency. Her new book is Powered By People: How Talent-Centric Organizations Master Recruitment, Retention, and Revenue (and How to Build One). Learn more at verticalelevation.com.

How Businesses Should Handle Sensitive Data in 2022

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StrategyDriven Risk Management Article |Handle Sensitive Data|How Businesses Should Handle Sensitive Data in 2022Mishandling sensitive data can be fatal for your business. Not only is this data usually given to you in trust by your customers, but it’s something that you’re legally required to protect, keeping safe and secure. In this article, we’ll look at ways in which you should be handling all sensitive data internally. The tips below will ensure that you’re able to keep handling sensitive data – whether that’s credit card details or personally identifiable information – without being at risk of data breaches or leaks that could damage your business.

Training

All good data handling begins with training. All your staff should be trained in how to keep data secure and how to keep their logins and passwords safe. This might take a training day, with you bringing in external facilitators to show your staff how to best handle data. Alternatively, you could appoint a data manager who is ultimately in charge of how your data is handled internally. They’ll have the master key for your sensitive data, and they’ll be an employee that you can trust to know how to handle data without leaving it at risk of being stolen or exposed.

Transfers

Sometimes, you’ll need to transfer sensitive data from place to place. That might be from one physical server to another, from your business to another business, or from a physical server into the cloud. During these moments of transit, your data is more likely to be intercepted and exposed, which means that you should concentrate on finding ways to secure your data when it’s in transit. Use Globalscape secure file transfer technology to ensure that your data is moved from place to place without the risk of being intercepted by bad actors or leaked accidentally when you need to move data to a new location.


Cybersecurity

Even when your data is simply sitting in a database without being moved, it could be exposed by bad actors who hack into your systems. This has happened several times in the past year, often via ransomware attacks that steal company data and demand a ransom payment to have it returned to them. The best way to protect from these threats is to install a reliable cybersecurity system. These are sold to businesses in many shapes and sizes, so it’s well worth doing a little research before deciding on which package you should purchase. Many are tailored to businesses just like yours.

Data Hygiene

The final tip in this guide is to keep your data clean and readable at all times. If your data is scattered across different platforms, is difficult to read, and will take a lot of manual editing in order to understand and leverage, it’s more likely that your workers will have to access sensitive data on their laptops and work devices, instead of leaving that data protected within files and databases. If you practice good data hygiene and keep your data machine-readable, you’ll never have to expose your data in the first place – it’ll be read and processed automatically, which means you’ll rarely have to access it in the first place.

Use these tips to secure your sensitive data in the future.

The Best Strategies To Get Your Business Noticed

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StrategyDriven Marketing and Sales Article |Business Strategies|The Best Strategies To Get Your Business NoticedOne of the biggest challenges that businesses have is getting noticed, especially in today’s digital age. These days, businesses across the board have to compete with many companies online, and this can make it hard to stand out and get noticed. This is particularly true when you are a new or small business competing against much larger brands. So, what can be done about this? There are a few effective strategies to try that will help you to stand out, get noticed and start competing at a much higher level. Keep reading for a few of the best strategies to get your business noticed.

Market Research

First, you should use market research as a way to learn about the market and how you can differentiate yourself. Market research is a key stage when starting a business, but markets change, so it is helpful to carry out new market research every few years. This should help you to find a way to differentiate yourself while still appealing to your target market.

Find An Influencer

These days, one of the best ways to stand out and get noticed is with influencer marketing. Having someone with influence in your industry recommend your products/services will help you to reach a much larger audience. Plus, this is a highly effective way to instantly build credibility for your brand. Influencer marketing can take your business to new heights and help you to compete at a much higher level.


Manage Partnerships with PRM

One of the best ways to stand out and get noticed is to strike up partnerships with other businesses. This can help you to raise brand awareness, tap into new markets and build credibility. Partnerships can take your business to new levels of success, but they can also be hard to manage when you consider how many tasks are involved with each partnership, including onboarding, enablement, and commission repayments. This is why it is a smart idea to use a partner relationship management (PRM) solution that can make partnerships easy to manage; learn more from Workspan.

Create Engaging Content

Every brand is creating content as a way to get noticed online, but few are creating content that is actually engaging and valuable. This presents an opportunity for your brand, so you need to think about topic ideas that will engage your target market and either entertain or educate them. You then need to bring this content to life with multimedia, statistics, quotes, and interesting viewpoints that will actually get your business noticed online.

Raise Awareness In The Community

It is not just the internet that you should be focusing on, as you can also get noticed by raising awareness in the local community. There are many ways that this can be done, including hosting events, attending community events, getting involved with schools, raising money for charity, and networking with other business owners.

These are a few of the best strategies to use if you are looking to get your business noticed and want to stand out from the crowd.

Future Manufacturing Trends Your Business Needs to Know

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StrategyDriven Managing Your Business Article |Manufacturing Trends|Future Manufacturing Trends Your Business Needs to KnowManufacturing businesses are a staple in the global market, as they endeavor to keep up with the supply and demand of consumers. To do this, they have to continuously identify problems and inefficiencies, improve processes and overcome any challenges that are thrown their way.

One of the best ways to stay ahead in the industry and ensure your business is competitive is by keeping up with the latest manufacturing trends. This is because the manufacturing trends are driven by the needs of the industry and tools that are going to improve the objectives of any business, for example, technological advances.

While the industry is changing, global events such as the COVID-19 pandemic have also played a role in shaping the future of manufacturing due to the new obstacles and challenges the industry had to face. This meant a huge overhaul in the way that manufacturers had to run their businesses, as well as a shift in the way that consumers shop and purchase products. It has given many businesses a new perspective on the way things are run.

Many future trends in the manufacturing industry are going to be a response to these challenges that society faces, and provide businesses with sophisticated opportunities.

Here are some of the top future manufacturing trends that your business needs to know.

#1 Smart factories

It seems the manufacturing industry is at a tipping point, where more businesses will begin to build smart factories. This may include smart equipment, as well as smart software that provides a central monitoring system and data analytics, such as Overall Equipment Effectiveness software.

The free time during the COVID-19 pandemic was able to raise a variety of problems and inefficiencies with current software and machinery, and many businesses are using this as an opportunity to phase out older equipment and bring in new machines that are equipped with the latest technology and combines several processes into one machine.

Incorporating smart equipment will play a huge role in how efficient your business is, and the quality of your output. It will ensure you remain competitive in the market, as you will be able to keep up with your competitors who are reaping the same benefits. If you don’t, you will create a big gap between yourself and your competitors, and find your business plateaus.


#2 Sustainable processes

Sustainable processes are a huge focus for many businesses in the manufacturing industry. As Governments all over the world are implementing high targets for emissions, it is up to businesses to play their role and make positive and impactful changes. They are also going to come under pressure from their clients, who are going to want to work with businesses that are meeting the Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) standard requirements.

Manufacturing businesses are responsible for a large portion of toxic emissions. This is because of the variety of activities that are involved in the business, such as transporting goods, producing energy to run machinery, chemical reactions when working with raw materials, and waste in the production process.

In the near future, manufacturing businesses are going to be making more sustainable choices, for example, by only working with suppliers that have a Green certificate, not running equipment unnecessarily, using quality machines, utilizing renewable energy resources, reducing plastic consumption, pursuing carbon-neutral practices, reducing waste by recycling and reusing materials and much more.

#3 Health and safety

Health and safety should always be a priority, especially in a manufacturing business where the risk of injury is much higher. However, there are hundreds of fatalities per year, and this number only continues to rise. This has resulted in health and safety becoming a trend, in the hopes that more businesses will take it seriously.

Many businesses are employing a range of different systems and processes that will help make the workplace a much safer place for employees to be, with the goal of reducing risks and accidents. There will be more reviews in the workplace to monitor safety habits and behaviors, as well as regular training for all staff members, especially with the introduction of new technology.

Businesses are also investing in advanced equipment that will monitor the movement of their employees and even other aspects such as their temperature. This is to help with the control of COVID-19 and ensure employees are fit and well for work, and do not disrupt the workforce. During the pandemic, many businesses suffered with staff on furlough and off sick. Stricter measures that look after employees’ health will help keep staff well, happy and working.

With new technology and sustainable practices being introduced, the future of manufacturing is close.

How to Protect Your Company’s Data

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StrategyDriven Organizational Performance Measures Article |Protect your company's data|How to Protect Your Company's DataWhen you’re running a business your data is one of the most important things that you possess. If your data is compromised it can allow cybercriminals to get access to sensitive information that can cripple your business.

Sometimes businesses recover in a few weeks but the amount of revenue that is lost can be devastating and it can take several months or even years for the business to recover. Some businesses never recover at all and they completely go under because of a security breach, here are some tips for protecting your business.

Do Regular Audits

Conducting a regular cyber security audit is one way to protect your data. When you do regular audits you will identify the strengths and weaknesses as well as the gaps in your security and you can take measures to swiftly correct them before your data is reached.

Have a Plan

The next thing you need to do is to have a plan of how you are going to deal with security breaches. Your audit will tell you about your vulnerabilities and you can then come up with a step-by-step plan for dealing with them.

The best thing you can do for your business is to have a cyber security protocol in place. This way those on your team who are in charge of IT will know exactly which steps to take if data has been compromised.

Consider outsourcing your IT services to AWS Professional Services to get managed IT services to protect your data.


Do Regular Backups

Backing up your data is one of the easiest ways to protect your business. You can do this daily in the clouds. You can even do it every few hours if that makes you feel more secure.

This way if your data is hacked and stolen you can access it to get your business up and running sooner rather than later.

Educate Your Employees

Cybercrime can take many different forms and it is up to you to educate your employees about this. Many times companies have data breaches simply because employees were ignorant about the different types of cybersecurity and data breaches that are possible.

For example, one of the most popular cyber crimes is phishing emails. These emails look as if they are coming from legitimate persons in an organization. However, on closer inspection, they contain links to malware and ransomware or phishing websites that mimic your company’s website.

All this is done to capture information and target your financial and other sensitive information.

Stay Safe

Securing your business data should always be a priority. Breaches in security can affect your business significantly.

The best way to avoid this is to ensure that you have a plan in place that addresses cybersecurity. You should always be on the lookout for suspicious activity that signals something is not right.

Once you identify these things you can then take action to secure your business as quickly as possible.