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The Essence of a Workforce Strategy

StrategyDriven Resource Projection Article | The Essence of a Workforce StrategyProductivity is a critical element in the growth of your business. Realizing enhanced efficiency requires observing various aspects, including workforce management, resource distribution, and excellent workforce planning. You’ll need to align your workforce to match your business culture, strategy, and objectives. Notable benefits come with a superb workforce strategy, including the following.

Plan for the Future

An excellent workforce strategy allows you to plan for the future. This strategy will enable you to anticipate workforce changes, including planning. Unless you are informed about workforce changes and trends, deciding on the future will hardly suffice.

Deciding on the future will depend on the objectives and targets of the company. For instance, you’ll need more workers during peak seasons. In such cases, while your labor costs will grow, you’ll be confident of enhanced efficiency and productivity. Thankfully, you can address this through a workforce strategy covering various future risks.

Manage Hiring Costs

A workforce strategy helps analyze your business needs, ensuring that you only hire when necessary. This strategy will provide enough employees to work on various production lines. You can increase the number of workers depending on business needs.

This approach will help you control hiring costs. While there will be enough employees at a particular time, the expenses will remain relatively manageable. In turn, it becomes easier to run the business smoothly.

Streamlined Recruitment Process

Nothing compares to the efficiency offered by a company that anticipates future changes. An excellent workforce strategy will give you insight into what changes your business could face in the future. This element allows you to plan your recruitment process according to your expectations. Through this, you get enough workers at all times, particularly during peak seasons.

At the same time, this strategy will outline what elements to observe during the recruitment process. This aspect allows you to hire qualified and experienced professionals, guaranteeing better outcomes in the long run. You’ll comfortably identify gaps in your talent acquisition and recruitment programs. With a comprehensive strategy, you are confident of better returns.

Your HR programs will also align with your business needs. Such alignment encourages employee retention in the long run. Achieving this goal requires observing various aspects, from data protection and employee assistance to career development and employee benefits.

Improve Business and Employee Culture

A comprehensive workforce strategy will look at various aspects of your workforce. It will touch on behavior, expectations, and changes. This aspect will inform your employee retention tactics. Ideally, it ensures that you breed a culture that encourages workers to stay, guaranteeing efficiency. With unmatched productivity, your business will thrive within a short time.

You can leverage predictive analytics to understand what employees might need in the future. This aspect ensures that your plans provide space for enhanced employee satisfaction. You could also devise ways to ensure that these professionals are significantly comfortable in the long run.

Having a reliable workforce strategy should be your priority. It will help improve efficiency and productivity, encouraging excellent returns in the long run. With the insights above, you understand why you should create a comprehensive one.

Growth Mindset Should Be a Part of Your Business Strategy

StrategyDriven Strategic Planning Article | Growth Mindset Should Be a Part of Your Business StrategyAn organization that embraces a growth mindset positions itself to thrive. A growth mindset encompasses a set of behaviors and attitudes that reflect a business owner’s belief that their company’s business model is not set in stone. Such an entrepreneur is open to infusing new talents, innovations and creativity into the business to strengthen it and guarantee its longevity.

Aside from adjusting your business model as part of your growth strategy, you should also hire flexible employees with the capacity to learn and grow with the business. Your staff needs to share in your ambition to develop a future-oriented business. They should be ready to take on new roles, advance their skills and evolve with the company’s growth.

You will also rely heavily on integrated learning tools that facilitate employees’ professional development and streamline business operation. An Integrated Learning Systems (ILS) mindset growth arms the learning and development (L&D) department with accessible solutions for the evolving business operations.

Striving to become truly good at what you do guarantees that more customers will want your services. A growth mindset enables your business to stand out because it ensures you put in the work to achieve the company’s full potential. Continue reading to learn how incorporating a growth mindset in your business strategy helps you add value to the company.

Embrace Integrated Learning Systems

So how do you ensure you have talented employees by your side as you prepare your business for exponential growth? Integrated learning systems (ILS) is the solution you should embrace to provide your workforce with the necessary training to withstand the roller coaster ride of change as the business evolves.

How can you train your growth mindset and ensure your employees are more knowledgeable and competent in their jobs? Technology-based employee training offers a stack of solutions that address all parts of their learning needs. ILS mindset growth enables your business to shift towards digital learning and earn the massive benefits of training your team to execute development projects better.

ILS provides your company with a vast library of content suitable for end-to-end corporate training solutions. The system’s continuous micro-learning allows your staff to master new skills in the flow of work. Such a modern integrated learning solution that embraces all types caters to different types of employee development needs.

You also gain access to various forms of skills assessment to deliver skills-driven learning. This way, your employees can be more productive and better positioned to satisfy your customers.

Build a Culture of Taking Risks

To embrace a growth mindset is to accept that failure is an inevitable part of growth. But this should not hold you back from stepping out of your comfort zone. Oftentimes, when entrepreneurs recognize their weaknesses, they end up holding on to their failures as well. But working on one’s weaknesses does not mean you carry your failures as a burden.

When you focus on your failures, you’re distracted from the potential success your business can achieve in the future. Instead, claim and learn from past failures, then focus on growing from the mistakes. Building a culture of taking risks enables you to feed creativity and innovation into the business to fuel it forward, notwithstanding the risks involved.

Ensure you lead by example by practicing controlled risk-taking to allow the business to expand beyond your established market segment. Additionally, allow your employees to take on leadership roles that require them to learn how to think on their feet. If you don’t empower your employees to take some risk, they cost the company money by playing it safe.

Forward-thinking employees will learn from their mistakes and utilize their freedom and independence to tap into new markets. While it will take some time and effort, the risk is worth the reward.

Understand Your Purpose

For your business to stand out based on its specialty, you need to be purpose-driven, doing what you love for the people that love what you do. Purpose helps you define your company’s reason for being beyond profit. Ensure the purpose you establish for your business encompasses the company’s ultimate role in the broader economic, environmental and social context for years to come.

While on the surface, the products and services you offer keep your business running, a clear purpose that defines the impact your company can make guarantees its longevity. Define and articulate your purpose in a way that enlightens your employees and propels positive change. An elaborate purpose will:

  • Inform your long-term business strategies
  • Establish a competitive advantage in a saturated market
  • Inspire innovation
  • Boost brand visibility and brand credibility

Your employees will be motivated to go the extra mile to put your business on the map when you establish a relevant and aspirational purpose for your organization. Your purpose will be like the north star that guides day to day business operations towards a specific goal.

Conclusion

To become a forward-thinking company, you need to incorporate a growth mindset in your business strategy. It’s essential that you think and act differently in order to position your business on the map. Use these solution-driven approaches to unleash your business’ full potential.

Create A Business Strategy That Works

Having a business strategy is more important now than it ever was before. As a small business you might find yourself in hot waters at the minute due to the current economic climate, and the fact that many small businesses haven’t survived the pandemic. When the world shut down and nobody was trading, business profits obviously plummeted and a lot of small businesses that were already on the brink have had to cease trading. So if you’re here reading this as a trading business then you’ve already done far better than many small businesses before you. Unless you’ve found some way to have a huge cash injection from somewhere you will no doubt be feeling the pressure to perform at the minute, especially if you’ve got staff employed under your belt. So, we’re going to try and help you create a business strategy that we think works during these current turbulent times.

StrategyDriven Strategic Planning Article | Create A Business Strategy That WorksA Financial Plan

This is the most important one that you need to be thinking about. Your financial plan now will be far different to the one that it was at the start of the year. Our advice is to be a little more cutthroat with the cuts you make. It’s like with your personal spendings, you get used to the money you have to spend and it’s hard to change back from that. Business is no different, areas of your business are used to receiving a certain amount of money and it’s hard to change that. So one area we would suggest making cuts is with employees, if you need to. If times are really testing, you should consider joining the many businesses who have had to make their staff redundant. Although it’s such a hard thing to do, it’s the easiest way to save a lot of money for the year.

A Marketing Plan

The quickest way to get your business back on track is to sell sell sell, and the quickest way to do that is to get people thinking about your business again. One we think small businesses in particular seem to not focus on, is SEO. Everything is online at the minute and most people will Google your business, or keywords related to it, before they decide to work with you. But what if they can’t find you? Or what if competitors beat you in the search? That’s where SEO comes in. ECommerce SEO might be a little more expensive compared to some marketing methods, but it’s going to prove the most effective if you want to gain attention. So are simple marketing techniques such as billboard advertising. It’s the sort of in your face advertising that you need!

A Sales Plan

Finally, make sure that you have a solid sales plan. One idea might be to go through your directory of old clients or customers and get in touch with them. Just a courtesy phone call or email to see how they’re doing and to put your business back in their mind. You don’t have to push sales or make multiple calls, that’s when your business gains a bad reputation.

How We Prioritize at Sticker Mule

StrategyDriven Managing Your Business Article | How We Prioritize at Sticker MuleOrganizations are the sum of their decisions. Those that prioritize well prosper and those that don’t falter. At Sticker Mule, prioritization is the most important thing we do. Our growth accelerates as we prioritized better, but there’s always room to improve.

What prioritization is not

Most literature on prioritization is terrible. It leads you to believe prioritization is about time management or how to use to-do lists. This way of thinking neglects that priorities are what make or break businesses.

Consider that Amazon started as a bookstore in 1994 and grew to $147 million within 3 years. Today they employ 500,000 people who handle $200 billion in revenue. They picked the right projects and grew at an extraordinary pace.

Other retailers had different priorities and either failed or are much smaller. Walmart could be Amazon, but they did not prioritize the Internet and now they are worth half as much.

What prioritization is

Prioritization is picking the right tasks to maximize impact. That means finding high impact tasks and avoiding low impact ones. Usually the highest impact tasks are elusive. We don’t know the highest impact projects we could pursue right now.

Prioritization might sound stressful, but it’s not. Most tasks won’t affect us. Consequently, we shouldn’t stress about the backlog of tasks we “need” to do. We need to keep our minds free to pursue high impact ideas, when they present themselves, by neglecting low impact ones.

Prioritization categories

It’s unproductive to precisely categorize every task, but it’s useful to roughly classify them in your mind. Prioritization improves with practice and thinking about these categories helps us improve.

  • Growth vs. costs – It’s generally better to use our time to grow revenue than reduce costs. Time is finite. Cash isn’t.
  • High vs. low impact – High impact is better, but completing lots of low impact tasks can be worthwhile if we complete them quickly.
  • Enduring vs. temporary – Tasks that provide enduring value are preferable to those that deliver value temporarily.
  • Definite vs. potential – It’s better to pursue improvements with definite benefits than those with potential.
  • Short vs. long term results – Quick wins are preferable, but you can build competitive advantage pursuing ideas that yield results in the long term since others tend to neglect them.
  • Related vs. unrelated tasks – Sometimes related tasks are completed more efficiently when grouped together. For this reason, we often do low impact tasks that pair well with high impact ones.
  • Estimated time to complete – All else equal, tasks that can be completed faster are preferable.

Questions

Ask yourself these questions periodically to improve your ability to prioritize:

  1. What’s the most impactful thing you can work on?
  2. Did you correctly identify the problems you are facing?
  3. Do you know the most important problem to solve next?
  4. Can you replace any planned tasks with better ones?
  5. Can you delete any especially low impact tasks entirely?

Conclusion

We aim to embed a passion for prioritization into our culture. If you think similarly and want to join our global team, we are hiring.


About the Author

Anthony Constantino is the cofounder and CEO of Sticker Mule. A factory guy at heart, Anthony oversees an operation that spans 16 countries in 4 continents with customers including Google, Facebook, Twitter and many of the world’s best brands. He’s determined to make Sticker Mule, already the Internet’s favorite printing company, the absolute best place to work and shop.

The Nine Building Blocks of Innovating New Strategic Alternatives

When organizations consider stepping outside of their traditional boundaries to engage with other players in new types of business innovations, they are often a bit lost in how to go about developing such a strategy process. And indeed, multi-stakeholder collaborations often don’t have the luxury of a traditional leader, as there is no formal hierarchy or power structure. They frequently emerge from a conversation between different players and may have an informal initiator who does not hold a formal position of power. When different participants of different organizations participate in a co-creation event, it is indeed supposed to be a meeting of equals.

However, without that leadership function, it can get confusing who is in charge of what and who makes what decisions. Clarity about ownership and process help in such situations that are unusual for most participants who come from hierarchical structures or have grown up in them before. In our experience, it is helpful to have a facilitator present when holding such sessions in order to ensure that decision-making clarity is present. Such a facilitator allows the initiator to participate with his perspective like any other member of the group.

Not every such strategy process looks the same and it is useful to differentiate between nine basic building blocks of co-creation. These can be grouped into five phases: getting started, gaining momentum, the small innovation cycle, scaling out, and rounding off. With exception of the last phase, each phase consists of two building blocks, see Figure 1.

The book “Five Superpowers for Co-creators” outlines the nine building blocks of co-creation in the context of what it takes to successfully work with external stakeholders to develop new business models and strategies (www.5superpowers.org). The book also looks at the challenges at the individual, group and facilitation levels and suggests practical pathways to progress when the process get stuck.

StrategyDriven Alternative Development Article | Strategic Initiatives | The nine building blocks of innovating new strategic alternatives

Figure 1: The nine building blocks of co-creation

A successful multi-stakeholder process consists of a number of building blocks. These cover three specific activities: those of the initiator of the project, those related to co-creation event and those related to scaling and engagement activities. Each of these can be divided into three building blocks for a total of nine.

The facilitator is mostly involved in the co-creation events and may help the initiator in the activities specific to his role. There is a small innovation cycle consisting of a repetition of co-creation events and prototyping. Combining all nine building blocks is define as the large innovation cycle.

A typical co-creation event consists of a multitude of stakeholder engagement and interaction exercises and workshops designed to balance listening, sharing, visioning, brainstorming, ideation and early prototyping.

A more detailed overview of the objectives of each building block is provided in Figure 2. The building blocks serve as a way to render the process transparent and clear in terms of what needs to happen along the co-creation journey. Clearly, there is no need to use all nine steps. We have indeed provided a pragmatic short-cut of these building blocks as a concise business strategy tool we call SDGXCHANGE (www.SDGX.org) which use only the most essential elements required for business to innovative new strategic alternatives.

StrategyDriven Alternative Development Article | Strategic Initiatives | The nine building blocks of innovating new strategic alternatives

Figure 2: The objectives of each of the nine building blocks

The article builds on extracts of the Book “Five Superpowers for Co-creators”


About the Author

StrategyDriven Expert Contributor | Katrin MuffDr. Katrin Muff (www.KatrinMuff.com) is a thought leader in the transformative space of sustainability and responsibility. She is Director at the Institute for Business Sustainability and holds a position as Professor of Practice at the LUISS Business School. She works with leaders, their teams and their boards in the area business transformation towards sustainability. She co-developed the Competency Assessment for Responsible Leadership (). Most recently, Katrin published Five Superpowers for Co-creators (www.5superpowers.org), which features the nine building blocks of co-creation including a pragmatic solution for business organization with the applied strategy tool SDGXCHANGE (www.SDGx.org).

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