#mc_embed_signup{background:#fff; clear:left; font:14px Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; }
/* Add your own Mailchimp form style overrides in your site stylesheet or in this style block.
We recommend moving this block and the preceding CSS link to the HEAD of your HTML file. */
There are millions of businesses worldwide, each actively trying to improve its bottom line and organization. If you are a business owner or a manager, it’s your responsibility to look for areas of improvement in your business performance.
The trends toward organizational efficiency force us to constantly improve and become more efficient. With so many small details that contribute to the success of a business, it can be difficult to nail all those processes down that will give the results you need.
Below are six actionable steps you can take to improve the performance of your business and make things efficient.
1. Do effective marketing
The marketing and sales combo is critical for a company’s overall performance. Marketing must set the stage for sales by creating demand and building brand awareness. Sales must convert that demand into revenue.
If either of these departments falls short, the company will not perform well. Company executives have to take many factors into account as they create their marketing plans and strategies. They must determine how to attract prospective buyers, which channels to use to reach out to those buyers, and what messages are most likely to resonate with them.
The key is creating highly-targeted, high-impact campaigns that get results — in terms of both brand awareness and revenue. This can help you attract new clients and generate more leads for your business. To run a successful sale you need to inform your audience via social media accounts, mailing, and also by placing a banner with a free countdown clock on your site.
It is also a powerful way to build relations with other professionals and turn them into referrals. With that said, if you first need education in marketing and sales then a General Master of Business Administration Degree may prove to be the right fit for you. Acquiring the skills taught in this degree will help you to build your business on core marketing and sales practices.
2. Create a culture of accountability
One of the most important things you can do to ensure your organization’s success over the long term is to establish a culture of accountability. Employees who are accountable for their actions and decisions—and who know they will be held accountable—will make better decisions, work harder, and produce positive results.
Employees are likely to act independently and responsibly if they know well advance what needs to be done. If they should seek help or clarification, it is up to them to ask for it. If they are unable to complete a certain task, they can be held accountable for it.
One of the first steps in creating a culture of accountability is ensuring that everyone knows exactly what their responsibilities are. Job descriptions should be clear and specific, leaving little room for interpretation or ambiguity about individual roles and duties. More importantly, tasks should have clearly defined timelines attached for employees to be held accountable for them.
3. Effective team communication
When confronted with a challenge, a well-run business or organization responds quickly, decisively, and effectively. If a company is failing to communicate well, then it is probably also failing to address its problems in a timely fashion. On the other hand, one of the most important benefits of effective communication is that it allows a business to respond quickly and effectively to problems.
A major part of effective communication is the ability to streamline feedback and responses. A team member should be able to ask for clarification on a project right away and have their queries answered by the person in charge as soon as possible.
When errors or potential bugs in the system are reported, make sure that they are immediately sent up the chain of command so they can be taken care of before it affects processes.
4. Set goals
Setting organizational goals is a great way to improve your organization’s performance. Goals have a way of providing you and your team with direction and focus. In many organizations, setting goals is a formal process.
This approach has its pros and cons, but most importantly, it is not the only way to set goals. You can set goals for yourself and your employees in an informal manner by simply listing the objectives you need to accomplish in the coming months.
This list should be tied to your organization’s overall strategy and mission statement. You can make this connection explicit by writing down your mission statement at the top of the page so you can refer back to it when creating your goals.
You can then take this list and go over it with each member of your team. Explain why each goal is important, and how it contributes to the organization’s overall strategy. Also, be sure to include deadlines for each of the goals if they’re not built-in.
5. Identify your team’s strengths and weaknesses
A much-overlooked aspect of improving your organization’s performance is to identify the strengths and weaknesses of your team. The more you know about your people, the more you can use their strengths to create a stronger team. What you get from this process is a professional profile of each person on your team. Once you have these profiles, use them to make better decisions about everything from hiring new staff to delegating tasks and creating workgroups.
Here is how you can create these profiles:
1) Ask each team member to complete an anonymous questionnaire that will identify their strengths and weaknesses. You should be able to find such questionnaires online or in other business operations resources. If not, have someone on your staff who is well-versed in the business operations and job descriptions come up with one based on the samples available online.
2) Collect the results and analyze them. Look for patterns within the responses that tell you about the kind of work environment each person prefers and where their strengths lie. Be sure to ask them to indicate their level of interest in performing the different roles and the corresponding skills that they have.
3) Schedule time with each person individually to further validate the findings from your analysis and discuss how best to take advantage of their preferences and strengths.
6. Set up a reward system
Employees who are satisfied with their employers do their best to make their businesses a success. Instituting a reward system for the employees can be a great way to improve an organization’s performance.
The best way to motivate people is to give them rewards that matter to them. Apart from monetary incentives, there are other rewards that your employees might be interested in.
Make absolutely sure that the rewards reach those who deserve them and not to those that are trying to curry favors with the management. If employees notice any nepotism going on, they might feel dejected from doing well on their job. So have a transparent reward system to incentivize hardworking employees to step up to the demands of the job.
Conclusion
Whether you are a manager or a business owner, a great way to improve your organization’s performance is through implementing good marketing and organizational principles at the helm. With solid principles for guidance, you will be less likely to steer your ship into choppy waters or sink your bottom line in bad investments or business decisions. Taking care of employees the right way, upholding their interests and feedback will motivate them. As a consequence, your business’ performance is going to improve exponentially if you applied the principles mentioned above.
Photo by fauxels from Pexels
