Instilling good health and safety practices in your workplace is essential. In fact, it should always be at the top of a business’s priorities, even if the industry your business is part of isn’t considered to undertake high-risk activities.
Failing to put in place appropriate health and safety measures can have serious repercussions that may negatively impact the overall success of your company. To emphasize more, this article will take you through the 5 business benefits of good health and safety at work that you should know about.
1. Save more on legal and insurance costs
It’s generally a bad idea for your business to be in and out of courtrooms due to scenarios that might have been avoided in the first place. Having said that, accidents at work can turn out to be very expensive in terms of legal fees, compensation payouts, fines, and remedial action required. If you properly train your employees on the importance of maintaining safety at the workplace, the possibility of having any costly accidents are greatly reduced.
2. Increase productivity
Good health and safety can also increase the overall productivity of any business. With proper measures in place, your employees will be able to carry out their jobs more efficiently, while remaining safe. This is because their morale will be highly uplifted knowing that they have very little to worry about concerning their health and safety at the workplace. I’m sure you’d like your employees to leave the workplace in the same healthy condition they arrived in, right?
“Back in the day, if there was an accident or health and safety issue in your workplace, you may have opened a filing cabinet to follow the paper trail. Those days are gone”, says David Rowland, head of marketing at Effective Software. “This is because the software has now become the dominant way to administer health and safety systems, and this can save your business time, unnecessary losses and, in the end, money”.
3. Enhance reputation
If your employees feel that you care about their health and safety, they will probably tell people about it. In the end, you’ll have more competition for employment spaces, and most importantly – more people will get to know about your brand (products or services).
For instance, let’s say you work as a call center agent in Company A, and as a result of work, you develop a throat and voice problem. Since you’ve made it a habit to call your mum after work, this time you simply text her and tell her that you can’t speak on the phone due to a voice problem you got from work. In the end, your mum might get a feeling that the company you’re working for is very irresponsible, and even go on to tell a friend about it. Word spreads around, and before you realize it, people don’t want to work for that company or buy its products.
4. Reduce absenteeism
Injuries or illness as a result of poor working conditions is arguably the main cause of increased employee absenteeism. For instance, if an integral staff member develops a more severe problem that requires an extended sick leave or time off, then you’ll definitely have to hire a new employee. Alternatively, you can choose to train someone within the company to take over the post. In as much as this is a step in the right direction, recruiting and training someone new will certainly cost you money. Don’t forget the amount of sick pay that you’ll have to pay the sick staff member.
5. Retain loyal employees
If your staff members feel valued by your company, this will most definitely make them happier at work. As a result, none of your employees would like to quit and work for a rival company. After all, who wouldn’t want to work for a highly reputable and caring company? Certainly not me!
It’s important that both you and your staff members are properly protected from injuries or illness at the workplace. By taking the necessary steps to safeguard their health and wellbeing, your employees will be far more inclined to focus on ensuring that your business succeeds. That’s why it’s important to remember the aforementioned business benefits of good health and safety at work.
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“The old paradigm of strategy departments and planning cycles has been overthrown by agile and rapid team-based problem solving, providing better solutions and better organization alignment to implement.” These comments by Mehrdad Baghai, strategist and author, commend our book Bulletproof Problem Solving: The One Skill that Changes Everything. But what does it mean to adopt agile and rapid team-based problem solving, where strategy becomes a problem solving process?
Teams and agile methodology have become the dominant form of organization for environments featuring high uncertainty and rapid change, where business models are challenged by disrupters. In these settings the most effective teams follow the 7 steps process for bulletproof problem solving, by asking themselves the following questions:
1. Are we working on the right problem?Defining a problem well is often said to take you more than halfway to the solution. This invariably leads to a clear problem statement of the challenges you have to address, the decision context, problem boundaries and success criteria.
2. Have we broken down the problem into key issues to address?Complex problems can rarely be solved without breaking the larger problem into parts. How you disaggregate or cleave a problem has a big impact on the insight you get into a problem. We show numerous examples from return on invested capital logic trees, to logic trees that help you decide whether to put solar panels on your roof.
3. Are our priorities for analysis the right ones? For efficient use of team resources you need to be working on the issues where the impact is high and you have a significant ability to influence the outcome. This may require a lot of debate in the team. That’s important too.
4. Have we brought outside perspectives and diversity of views to bear in the team?We urge teams to have hypotheses about the answer but open them to challenge in the team, by having diverse perspectives, role playing and actively tapping expertise outside the team. Really good teams porpoise frequently between the hypothesis and the data, sharpening the hypothesis along the way. The data comes in the form of facts and analysis. Yes facts and analysis still make a huge difference to problem solving outcomes.
5. Do we have the right analytic toolkit for the problem? Teams will, and should, make use of heuristics and rules of thumb to scope problems and knock out infeasible solutions. At times, to solve a problem involves understanding root causes or predicting an outcome. That’s when you have to bring out the analytic big guns such as regression, simulation, A/B experiments and machine learning. You can even crowdsource your solutions with Kaggle competitions.
6.Are we carefully synthesizing our findings? We like the way the successful investor Ray Dalio expresses it ‘The quality of your synthesis will determine the quality of your decision making.’ The process we follow is to draw together findings on the key issues into an overall picture, ideally with visualization to show linkages and highlight key drivers or root causes.
7. Have we presented our findings in a compelling narrative that is likely to lead to action? This final step is so often underdone and the source of team disappointment. Doing it the right way involves choosing a governing thought from the synthesis, accompanied by a logical argument structure that may be based on inductive or deductive reasoning.
When this process is complete, teams have reached the holy grail of strategy as a problem solving process as Richard Rumelt put it in Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters. Rumelt succinctly describes ‘a strategy is a coherent set of analyses, concepts, policies, arguments and actions that respond to a high stakes challenge.’ We agree and know that the way to get there is through a 7-step problem solving process.
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You really can’t expect your business to get far at all without a good, strong focus on digital marketing. Any digital marketing campaign you have will need to have a lot of focus and drive behind it, and generally you will find that it is important to make sure you are putting whatever effort into it you are able to. Digital marketing will prove to be an essential aspect to running your business and ensuring that it remains popular and continues to grow. But what do you need to think about in order to make sure that you are approaching it in the right way? In this article, we will look at just a few of the essential things that you need to do as part of your digital marketing campaign. As long as you are focused on these, you will be moving in the right direction.
You really can’t expect to get anywhere at all without a decent website, and in fact it is worth putting a good amount of your energy into this before you do anything else for your marketing efforts. The website is where it all comes back to, and as long as you are happy with that you will find that you are going to have much more success with your marketing overall. A good website needs professional designers to ensure that it is operating properly and working as well as possible. Fortunately, these days it is easy enough to find affordable web design which is going to work out well for you, so you should be able to do just that. With a website which you are happy with, you can then start to look at some of the other vital elements to digital marketing.
Social Media
You will find it is essential to have a good grasp of social media if you are to market your business online successfully, so make sure that you are looking into this as early on as you can. You will want to start building a following on Twitter, Facebook and the rest as soon as possible, and it’s important in particular to focus on actually having decent conversations with people on those platforms. If you do that, and develop a branded voice in doing so, you will find that people are much more likely to respond positively, and this will have the kind of effect that you are hoping to have for your digital marketing. Social media is incredibly powerful, so make sure that you are thinking about this.
PPC
Finally, it’s important to remember too that there are some ways of approaching digital marketing which have a more traditional advertising feel to them, and one in particular you might want to focus on is Pay-Per-Click advertising. This is essentially where you have a banner on websites which people click on to get through to your website or a particular call to action, and it is amazing how effective this kind of method can be. Be sure to make use of it, and you will find that your business has much more chance of success.
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Every business should have a carefully-selected arsenal of promotional tools at their disposal. Investigating and researching each one is just one way of creating a smart and savvy marketing strategy that is tailored around their business’s needs. Some might be suitable for one business, whereas others may be completely redundant – and might even form a bit of stumbling block in their overall marketing strategy. With this is in mind, here are the best promotional tools to consider for your company.
SEO
Now infamously used to boost web pages up Google’s rankings, SEO is a technique that prioritizes relevant words (keywords) and links to similar pages (link building) to promote a website’s credibility. However, the playing field has gotten a little tougher over the years as Google has clamped down on pages that misuse these techniques. Using a company with expertise, such as this SEO provider will help you to avoid being penalized for overusing common SEO techniques.
Twitter
Twitter is a great middle-ground for businesses of all types: it’s a little bit creative, a little bit topical and its use of hashtags makes it ideal for promotion. If you’re looking to create a specific tone of voice for your business, using emojis and GIFs are a great way of adding humor and color to your page. It’s also a great way to conduct polls and interact with clients and customers to show a little bit of customer service.
Instagram
If you have physical products to offer or create eye-catching campaigns or designs, then you should absolutely be advertising your business on Instagram. In fact, the site claims that 60% of people discover a brand new product using their platform. Be sure to bring your A-game when it comes to high-resolution images: low-quality content will not get your business noticed for the right reasons.
LinkedIn
LinkedIn is built for businesses and online networking, and so it really is worth putting your business on there to connect with other people in your industry. Not only that, but if you have job vacancies, you can use this platform to promote the job advert from in-house, so it will be seen by potential enthusiastic employees. However, just because it’s a business social media site doesn’t mean that your page should be uniform and basic. Make sure you fill your profile with videos, blogs, relevant content and update your picture and banner to branded imagery.
Facebook
If you have a physical shop of premises with opening hours, then you would be missing out on a trick by not using Facebook’s business page tools. Not only does it showcase your opening hours, but it also uses a messenger function to pre-empt frequently asked questions. It’s worth also noting that the Facebook algorithm prioritizes posts with numerous likes and comments – so encourage your visitors and followers to like and share.
Word of mouth
Never forget the old methods of promotion: good word of mouth. Your business should aim to be the ‘have you seen’ or ‘have you heard of’ on everyone’s lips. Offering customers a ‘recommend to a friend’ discount is just one way to encourage word of mouth, on top of delivering an excellent quality of service.
Networking
Yet another traditional method of promotion, networking works by offering a genuine personal touch. In the same way that many people would prefer to be called or visited rather than emailed, going out to trade fairs or out into the community to chat to like-minded customers or professionals adds a personal touch to your company’s name, stopping you from being just a faceless brand.
Customer service
Customer service should be in every business’s promotional armory, and yet it’s so often neglected. There’s nothing that damages a business’s credibility more than the knowledge that they handle customer queries and complaints poorly. Training your customer service team and anyone who might be answering phone calls to interact with customers efficiently and with a friendly manor will do wonders for the aforementioned positive word of mouth. At the very least, perhaps installing a chatbot to your website will give the illusion of a full customer service team, as it will answer any queries that visitors may have.
A good website
Having a website that’s poorly maintained or clunky to use is like inviting a visitor into a messy building. Nowadays people exist more virtually than ever, which means that your website should uphold your business’s image and branding just as much as your premises would. Investing in a web designer to create aesthetically pleasing page furniture, a site map and an appealing and helpful ‘about’ section will be brilliant for visitors who want to know a little bit more about what you have to offer. As with any social media page, it should be full of eye-catching imagery and interesting content about what you have to offer. If you have the capacity to do so, it might be wise to upload a video about your business using Make Web Video, and maybe introduce the team who are behind it.
Also be sure to make sure your website is optimized for mobile use. Most online users browse the web using their smartphones, which means a clunky and PC-only website will make your business look out of date, as well as inaccessible.
A blog
If you want to show your expertise and passion as a business, then a blog is a great place to start. Writing regular industry posts will showcase your knowledge as a brand, and prove your ability to deliver accurate information about your profession. Not only that, but high-quality content is far more likely to get shared by online users, which means your company will get a big promotion in the process.
Not all of these promotional tools will be suitable for your business – after all, if you are starting up an accountancy firm, why would you use Instagram? Being selective and doing your research on your industry will ensure that any platforms or methods you take full advantage of will be used to the best of their ability.
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If you are keen to grow your business, there will most likely come a time when you are no longer able to do everything by yourself, and you will need to hire people to help you. This is an exciting time, but there is a lot to consider before you take anyone on. Apart from the obvious need to be able to pay everyone on time each month or week, you also need to make sure that your employees are happy.
Happy employees are more loyal, more productive, and more healthy than those who are unhappy in their jobs. It makes sense to keep your employees as happy as possible, and here are some of the ways to do it.
Keep Them Involved
Something that can often cause employees to feel unhappy is when they don’t feel involved in the business. Although as a boss you may not want to tell everyone what is happening all of the time, it is wise to keep them informed of the details that do involve them, or that they might be able to help with.
When you let people know what is happening around and within the business, they will feel more involved, and they will also feel more like part of a team. They will be more engaged in the business, and will often work harder, coming up with ideas to help if they know what issues or plans you are dealing with.
One way to do this is to send out a weekly email to everyone, detailing anything that might have happened that they need to be aware of. Alternatively, you could plan a meeting once a week where these details are discussed.
A Comfortable Office
Unless your employees work from home, you are going to need to have a comfortable office space for them to work in. It should be large enough for everyone to have their own space if need be, and include meetings room if you often have to host meetings for clients, staff, or suppliers.
Sunlight is another important factor; the more sunlight people can be in contact with, the better. It keeps them happy, but also keeps them healthy so they will take fewer sick days, and your business won’t be disrupted. Make sure there are windows in your office, or that your employees can go outside for breaks.
Ergonomic furniture such as chairs and desks, plenty of breaks throughout the day in a real break room, and an office that is clean and tidy in a good location that is easy to get to is also to be considered. Serviced offices can be the ideal way to find the right space, and you can view more here to see what is on offer.
Give Them The Right Tools
Employees want to do their job, and they want to do it well. For this to happen, they will need the right tools and equipment. If you don’t provide what they need, not only will they not be able to do their job, but they will feel unhappy in general, and they won’t want to stay with the company. Hiring new people is an expense in terms of both money and time, and keeping your current employees is a much better option.
Each different person will need different tools for their job, so make sure that you have these in place for when the role is filled. If anything is missing, make sure that your employees are happy to let you know, and that you can get what they need as soon as possible, within reason.
Don’t Give Them Big Goals To Reach
It’s important that your employees have goals that will enhance the business, but if you give them too many tasks to complete or goals that are too big, they will feel overwhelmed and unhappy. Even if they are capable of doing the work, they may not feel that you are listening to them, and they could become unproductive anyway.
The best way to ensure that everyone is happy and not being given too much to handle at work is to break everything down into smaller pieces. That way, the jobs will be more readily completed, and the sense of achievement that comes with this will push the employee to do even more, to be proud of themselves, and to be happy in their work.
Recognize Their Progress
If someone who works for you is doing a good job, let them know. They will appreciate the fact that you have noticed what they are doing, and this will usually make them work even harder, going above and beyond what has been asked of them.
When you acknowledge someone, do it in a way that will make them feel comfortable. They might like others to know what they have done so that you can call them out in front of their colleagues. They might prefer a quiet chat in your office behind closed doors. They might like to receive a store coupon or a voucher for a nice meal out. Everyone is different, so knowing your employees is important.
Trust Them
When employees know that you trust them, they will be much happier in their work. You can show your trust by delegating tasks to them; this proves that you believe your employees can do the work that you would normally do, and this is an important step.
Remember not to micromanage when you delegate, as this will have the opposite effect, and could upset your employees. Let them get on with the task at hand, and if they have any problems or issues ensure they know they can come to you with questions and ask for advice.
Even if you have no tasks to delegate, or you don’t think your staff is ready to do the work just yet, asking their opinion about something can be just as effective a way of showing your trust. You don’t have to implement all of their ideas, but asking is a good first step.
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5 Business Benefits of Good Health and Safety at Work
/in Human Performance Management/by StrategyDrivenFailing to put in place appropriate health and safety measures can have serious repercussions that may negatively impact the overall success of your company. To emphasize more, this article will take you through the 5 business benefits of good health and safety at work that you should know about.
1. Save more on legal and insurance costs
It’s generally a bad idea for your business to be in and out of courtrooms due to scenarios that might have been avoided in the first place. Having said that, accidents at work can turn out to be very expensive in terms of legal fees, compensation payouts, fines, and remedial action required. If you properly train your employees on the importance of maintaining safety at the workplace, the possibility of having any costly accidents are greatly reduced.
2. Increase productivity
Good health and safety can also increase the overall productivity of any business. With proper measures in place, your employees will be able to carry out their jobs more efficiently, while remaining safe. This is because their morale will be highly uplifted knowing that they have very little to worry about concerning their health and safety at the workplace. I’m sure you’d like your employees to leave the workplace in the same healthy condition they arrived in, right?
“Back in the day, if there was an accident or health and safety issue in your workplace, you may have opened a filing cabinet to follow the paper trail. Those days are gone”, says David Rowland, head of marketing at Effective Software. “This is because the software has now become the dominant way to administer health and safety systems, and this can save your business time, unnecessary losses and, in the end, money”.
3. Enhance reputation
If your employees feel that you care about their health and safety, they will probably tell people about it. In the end, you’ll have more competition for employment spaces, and most importantly – more people will get to know about your brand (products or services).
For instance, let’s say you work as a call center agent in Company A, and as a result of work, you develop a throat and voice problem. Since you’ve made it a habit to call your mum after work, this time you simply text her and tell her that you can’t speak on the phone due to a voice problem you got from work. In the end, your mum might get a feeling that the company you’re working for is very irresponsible, and even go on to tell a friend about it. Word spreads around, and before you realize it, people don’t want to work for that company or buy its products.
4. Reduce absenteeism
Injuries or illness as a result of poor working conditions is arguably the main cause of increased employee absenteeism. For instance, if an integral staff member develops a more severe problem that requires an extended sick leave or time off, then you’ll definitely have to hire a new employee. Alternatively, you can choose to train someone within the company to take over the post. In as much as this is a step in the right direction, recruiting and training someone new will certainly cost you money. Don’t forget the amount of sick pay that you’ll have to pay the sick staff member.
5. Retain loyal employees
If your staff members feel valued by your company, this will most definitely make them happier at work. As a result, none of your employees would like to quit and work for a rival company. After all, who wouldn’t want to work for a highly reputable and caring company? Certainly not me!
It’s important that both you and your staff members are properly protected from injuries or illness at the workplace. By taking the necessary steps to safeguard their health and wellbeing, your employees will be far more inclined to focus on ensuring that your business succeeds. That’s why it’s important to remember the aforementioned business benefits of good health and safety at work.
Strategy as a Problem Solving Process
/in Decision-Making/by Robert McLeanTeams and agile methodology have become the dominant form of organization for environments featuring high uncertainty and rapid change, where business models are challenged by disrupters. In these settings the most effective teams follow the 7 steps process for bulletproof problem solving, by asking themselves the following questions:
1. Are we working on the right problem? Defining a problem well is often said to take you more than halfway to the solution. This invariably leads to a clear problem statement of the challenges you have to address, the decision context, problem boundaries and success criteria.
2. Have we broken down the problem into key issues to address? Complex problems can rarely be solved without breaking the larger problem into parts. How you disaggregate or cleave a problem has a big impact on the insight you get into a problem. We show numerous examples from return on invested capital logic trees, to logic trees that help you decide whether to put solar panels on your roof.
3. Are our priorities for analysis the right ones? For efficient use of team resources you need to be working on the issues where the impact is high and you have a significant ability to influence the outcome. This may require a lot of debate in the team. That’s important too.
4. Have we brought outside perspectives and diversity of views to bear in the team? We urge teams to have hypotheses about the answer but open them to challenge in the team, by having diverse perspectives, role playing and actively tapping expertise outside the team. Really good teams porpoise frequently between the hypothesis and the data, sharpening the hypothesis along the way. The data comes in the form of facts and analysis. Yes facts and analysis still make a huge difference to problem solving outcomes.
5. Do we have the right analytic toolkit for the problem? Teams will, and should, make use of heuristics and rules of thumb to scope problems and knock out infeasible solutions. At times, to solve a problem involves understanding root causes or predicting an outcome. That’s when you have to bring out the analytic big guns such as regression, simulation, A/B experiments and machine learning. You can even crowdsource your solutions with Kaggle competitions.
6. Are we carefully synthesizing our findings? We like the way the successful investor Ray Dalio expresses it ‘The quality of your synthesis will determine the quality of your decision making.’ The process we follow is to draw together findings on the key issues into an overall picture, ideally with visualization to show linkages and highlight key drivers or root causes.
7. Have we presented our findings in a compelling narrative that is likely to lead to action? This final step is so often underdone and the source of team disappointment. Doing it the right way involves choosing a governing thought from the synthesis, accompanied by a logical argument structure that may be based on inductive or deductive reasoning.
When this process is complete, teams have reached the holy grail of strategy as a problem solving process as Richard Rumelt put it in Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters. Rumelt succinctly describes ‘a strategy is a coherent set of analyses, concepts, policies, arguments and actions that respond to a high stakes challenge.’ We agree and know that the way to get there is through a 7-step problem solving process.
About the Author
Master These Vital Aspects To Digital Marketing
/in Online Marketing and Website Development/by StrategyDrivenYou really can’t expect to get anywhere at all without a decent website, and in fact it is worth putting a good amount of your energy into this before you do anything else for your marketing efforts. The website is where it all comes back to, and as long as you are happy with that you will find that you are going to have much more success with your marketing overall. A good website needs professional designers to ensure that it is operating properly and working as well as possible. Fortunately, these days it is easy enough to find affordable web design which is going to work out well for you, so you should be able to do just that. With a website which you are happy with, you can then start to look at some of the other vital elements to digital marketing.
You will find it is essential to have a good grasp of social media if you are to market your business online successfully, so make sure that you are looking into this as early on as you can. You will want to start building a following on Twitter, Facebook and the rest as soon as possible, and it’s important in particular to focus on actually having decent conversations with people on those platforms. If you do that, and develop a branded voice in doing so, you will find that people are much more likely to respond positively, and this will have the kind of effect that you are hoping to have for your digital marketing. Social media is incredibly powerful, so make sure that you are thinking about this.
PPC
Finally, it’s important to remember too that there are some ways of approaching digital marketing which have a more traditional advertising feel to them, and one in particular you might want to focus on is Pay-Per-Click advertising. This is essentially where you have a banner on websites which people click on to get through to your website or a particular call to action, and it is amazing how effective this kind of method can be. Be sure to make use of it, and you will find that your business has much more chance of success.
The top 10 business promotional tools
/in Marketing & Sales/by StrategyDrivenSEO
Now infamously used to boost web pages up Google’s rankings, SEO is a technique that prioritizes relevant words (keywords) and links to similar pages (link building) to promote a website’s credibility. However, the playing field has gotten a little tougher over the years as Google has clamped down on pages that misuse these techniques. Using a company with expertise, such as this SEO provider will help you to avoid being penalized for overusing common SEO techniques.
Twitter
Twitter is a great middle-ground for businesses of all types: it’s a little bit creative, a little bit topical and its use of hashtags makes it ideal for promotion. If you’re looking to create a specific tone of voice for your business, using emojis and GIFs are a great way of adding humor and color to your page. It’s also a great way to conduct polls and interact with clients and customers to show a little bit of customer service.
Instagram
If you have physical products to offer or create eye-catching campaigns or designs, then you should absolutely be advertising your business on Instagram. In fact, the site claims that 60% of people discover a brand new product using their platform. Be sure to bring your A-game when it comes to high-resolution images: low-quality content will not get your business noticed for the right reasons.
LinkedIn
LinkedIn is built for businesses and online networking, and so it really is worth putting your business on there to connect with other people in your industry. Not only that, but if you have job vacancies, you can use this platform to promote the job advert from in-house, so it will be seen by potential enthusiastic employees. However, just because it’s a business social media site doesn’t mean that your page should be uniform and basic. Make sure you fill your profile with videos, blogs, relevant content and update your picture and banner to branded imagery.
Facebook
If you have a physical shop of premises with opening hours, then you would be missing out on a trick by not using Facebook’s business page tools. Not only does it showcase your opening hours, but it also uses a messenger function to pre-empt frequently asked questions. It’s worth also noting that the Facebook algorithm prioritizes posts with numerous likes and comments – so encourage your visitors and followers to like and share.
Word of mouth
Never forget the old methods of promotion: good word of mouth. Your business should aim to be the ‘have you seen’ or ‘have you heard of’ on everyone’s lips. Offering customers a ‘recommend to a friend’ discount is just one way to encourage word of mouth, on top of delivering an excellent quality of service.
Networking
Yet another traditional method of promotion, networking works by offering a genuine personal touch. In the same way that many people would prefer to be called or visited rather than emailed, going out to trade fairs or out into the community to chat to like-minded customers or professionals adds a personal touch to your company’s name, stopping you from being just a faceless brand.
Customer service
Customer service should be in every business’s promotional armory, and yet it’s so often neglected. There’s nothing that damages a business’s credibility more than the knowledge that they handle customer queries and complaints poorly. Training your customer service team and anyone who might be answering phone calls to interact with customers efficiently and with a friendly manor will do wonders for the aforementioned positive word of mouth. At the very least, perhaps installing a chatbot to your website will give the illusion of a full customer service team, as it will answer any queries that visitors may have.
A good website
Having a website that’s poorly maintained or clunky to use is like inviting a visitor into a messy building. Nowadays people exist more virtually than ever, which means that your website should uphold your business’s image and branding just as much as your premises would. Investing in a web designer to create aesthetically pleasing page furniture, a site map and an appealing and helpful ‘about’ section will be brilliant for visitors who want to know a little bit more about what you have to offer. As with any social media page, it should be full of eye-catching imagery and interesting content about what you have to offer. If you have the capacity to do so, it might be wise to upload a video about your business using Make Web Video, and maybe introduce the team who are behind it.
Also be sure to make sure your website is optimized for mobile use. Most online users browse the web using their smartphones, which means a clunky and PC-only website will make your business look out of date, as well as inaccessible.
A blog
If you want to show your expertise and passion as a business, then a blog is a great place to start. Writing regular industry posts will showcase your knowledge as a brand, and prove your ability to deliver accurate information about your profession. Not only that, but high-quality content is far more likely to get shared by online users, which means your company will get a big promotion in the process.
Not all of these promotional tools will be suitable for your business – after all, if you are starting up an accountancy firm, why would you use Instagram? Being selective and doing your research on your industry will ensure that any platforms or methods you take full advantage of will be used to the best of their ability.
How To Keep Your Employees Happy
/in Talent Management/by StrategyDrivenHappy employees are more loyal, more productive, and more healthy than those who are unhappy in their jobs. It makes sense to keep your employees as happy as possible, and here are some of the ways to do it.
Keep Them Involved
Something that can often cause employees to feel unhappy is when they don’t feel involved in the business. Although as a boss you may not want to tell everyone what is happening all of the time, it is wise to keep them informed of the details that do involve them, or that they might be able to help with.
When you let people know what is happening around and within the business, they will feel more involved, and they will also feel more like part of a team. They will be more engaged in the business, and will often work harder, coming up with ideas to help if they know what issues or plans you are dealing with.
One way to do this is to send out a weekly email to everyone, detailing anything that might have happened that they need to be aware of. Alternatively, you could plan a meeting once a week where these details are discussed.
A Comfortable Office
Unless your employees work from home, you are going to need to have a comfortable office space for them to work in. It should be large enough for everyone to have their own space if need be, and include meetings room if you often have to host meetings for clients, staff, or suppliers.
Sunlight is another important factor; the more sunlight people can be in contact with, the better. It keeps them happy, but also keeps them healthy so they will take fewer sick days, and your business won’t be disrupted. Make sure there are windows in your office, or that your employees can go outside for breaks.
Ergonomic furniture such as chairs and desks, plenty of breaks throughout the day in a real break room, and an office that is clean and tidy in a good location that is easy to get to is also to be considered. Serviced offices can be the ideal way to find the right space, and you can view more here to see what is on offer.
Give Them The Right Tools
Employees want to do their job, and they want to do it well. For this to happen, they will need the right tools and equipment. If you don’t provide what they need, not only will they not be able to do their job, but they will feel unhappy in general, and they won’t want to stay with the company. Hiring new people is an expense in terms of both money and time, and keeping your current employees is a much better option.
Each different person will need different tools for their job, so make sure that you have these in place for when the role is filled. If anything is missing, make sure that your employees are happy to let you know, and that you can get what they need as soon as possible, within reason.
Don’t Give Them Big Goals To Reach
It’s important that your employees have goals that will enhance the business, but if you give them too many tasks to complete or goals that are too big, they will feel overwhelmed and unhappy. Even if they are capable of doing the work, they may not feel that you are listening to them, and they could become unproductive anyway.
The best way to ensure that everyone is happy and not being given too much to handle at work is to break everything down into smaller pieces. That way, the jobs will be more readily completed, and the sense of achievement that comes with this will push the employee to do even more, to be proud of themselves, and to be happy in their work.
Recognize Their Progress
If someone who works for you is doing a good job, let them know. They will appreciate the fact that you have noticed what they are doing, and this will usually make them work even harder, going above and beyond what has been asked of them.
When you acknowledge someone, do it in a way that will make them feel comfortable. They might like others to know what they have done so that you can call them out in front of their colleagues. They might prefer a quiet chat in your office behind closed doors. They might like to receive a store coupon or a voucher for a nice meal out. Everyone is different, so knowing your employees is important.
Trust Them
When employees know that you trust them, they will be much happier in their work. You can show your trust by delegating tasks to them; this proves that you believe your employees can do the work that you would normally do, and this is an important step.
Remember not to micromanage when you delegate, as this will have the opposite effect, and could upset your employees. Let them get on with the task at hand, and if they have any problems or issues ensure they know they can come to you with questions and ask for advice.
Even if you have no tasks to delegate, or you don’t think your staff is ready to do the work just yet, asking their opinion about something can be just as effective a way of showing your trust. You don’t have to implement all of their ideas, but asking is a good first step.