Posts

Providing Your Staff With Everything They Need

/in /by

StrategyDriven Managing Your People Article | Providing Your Staff With Everything They Need

When you first start out with your small business, chances are you do everything yourself. That or you employ the help of third party, outsourced freelancers to complete more complex or specialist tasks that are outside of your skillset, such as creating a website or shooting product photography. Hiring staff doesn’t tend to be the first thing on any new business owner’s list. After all, employees are costly and you take on a big responsibility when you hire them. But as your business begins to grow and expand, you’re going to have to take on permanent staff at some point or another. It’s impossible to run a medium to large size business independently and employees will help to keep things ticking over and moving in the right direction. When you do take on staff, it’s absolutely essential that you understand their needs and provide them with everything that they do need to carry out their jobs effectively. Here are a few areas to focus on!

Carry Out Surveys

Sometimes, staff won’t be outright about what they need to do their work. They may feel awkward and fear repercussions for making requests. But it is important that you know their needs in order to cater to them. So, carry out anonymous surveys to check whether there’s anything that you can do for your staff to help them with their work. This could include suggestions for helpful software, changes to the working environment, or anything else that could prove beneficial to productivity.

Invest in Quality Software

Nowadays, most work is carried out online with the help of devices like smartphones, tablets, laptops and computers. So, your staff are going to rely heavily on good quality software to do their work. Make sure you have the best and most up to date necessary software available. You may even want to consider having custom software made to meet all of your business’ specific and unique needs and requirements.

Invest in Your Office Space

Your office space can have a profound impact on productivity. So, make sure it’s up to scratch. Your office should have all ergonomic furniture and accessories to protect your staff from strains and injuries. This could include the perfect ergonomic office chairs, desks, wrist supports, back supports, foot supports and more.

Invest in Health and Safety

When it comes down to it, health and safety guidelines are in place to protect your employees and it’s absolutely essential that you follow them. In fact, it’s so essential that you follow these guidelines that there are laws in place to ensure that you do. So, invest in everything you need in terms of health and safety. This could include fire extinguishers, permanent safety signage, temporary safety signage, electrical PAT tests and more.

Of course, there are a number of other areas you could focus on when it comes to providing your staff with everything that they need. But those outlined above should help to get you started out in the right direction!

How To Get The Most Out Of Your Employees

/in /by

StrategyDriven Talent Management Article|Get the Best out of Your Employees|How To Get The Most Out Of Your EmployeesYour employees are an important asset to the company, and in order for your business to continue thriving, you want to utilize your employees to the maximum. However, there are certain things you need to do in order to make this happen. So here are some tips to get the most out of your employees.

Keep Them Happy

Your staff happiness levels should always be bursting at the seams, and that is the secret to keeping your work productivity levels high. If you’re not trying your utmost to make your employees happy, then you’re going to see a dip in your company’s success. See each and every employee as a valued member of staff, whether they’re maintaining the building in the operations department or striking deals for the company with new clients. Their worth is how hard they work at their job, and if you’re not valuing this for everyone, then you’re going to have some unhappy staff members. And the last thing that you want that will be taking up your precious time is recruitment. So aim to keep your staff turnover low by doing your best to keep everyone happy in their work environment and when it comes down to their role too.

Good Communication Is Key

Having good communication is important within the workplace, and so it’s good to ensure you’re talking to your staff and checking they’re ok. Not only that but you need to check that communication between departments is effective and if it isn’t, then you need to work out why. It could be a case of people being on the wrong page, and then you’ve got two or three people doing the same tasks and not realizing until it’s too late. A good task management platform might be needed or regular meetings between departments to catch up on where they’re at in their day to day runnings. The more communication that is happening between departments and colleagues, the better everyone will be in their efficiency to get work done.

Give Them Regular Training

Regular training is not only beneficial for you as a company, but it also gives your staff some variety during their time within your company. Yes, any employee would enjoy a day off from the usual grind of work in order to learn about things that would benefit their job and career. So try to consider some job training courses and other workshops that your staff and your company can benefit from. Ask your staff for recommendations on what they’d like to explore and do within the work company’s budget. You may have some great suggestions that you hadn’t really given much thought to.

Create A Conflict-Free Atmosphere

A peaceful and happy atmosphere is one that should be something you strive for when it comes to the workplace. Granted, sometimes work tensions can run high, but it’s important how you manage these that will make the difference. Colleagues may not always get on, but it’s worth putting in incentives to help them get along in a professional capacity. You could do this by getting them to collaborate together more and to do work events where your staff can socialize outside of the work confines. When there’s conflict in the workplace, it’s important to quash this as soon as possible. Don’t ignore it and let it continue to affect the two or three involved. That’s only going to spread and make it a more uncomfortable environment for everyone. Pull them aside and sort out the issues at hand, make the changes needed where necessary and find a resolution that works for everyone.

Offer Flexibility And Company Perks

And finally, when you’re a good boss, it’s because you’re putting the welfare and happiness of your staff first and above all else. When your company is doing well, it’s only nice to spread that wealth around to other staff members. Offer as many company perks as you can and look to improve and increase them when possible. You might also want to be able to offer a bit more flexibility if possible, to those who have families or would like the option to work from home on certain days in the week or over the course of the month and year.

When you start focusing on your employees, you will certainly find a distinct improvement in their work productivity and the attitude they have towards their jobs. Use these tips to make these changes where possible and to try to get the most out of your staff.

Adjusting Your Marketing Strategy: What to Implement and What to Avoid

/in /by

StrategyDriven Marketing and Sales Article |marketing strategy|Adjusting Your Marketing Strategy: What to Implement and What to Avoid2020 has kicked off with a variety of new marketing trends.

Marketing is all about getting your business out there and building a relationship with customers. In many cases, businesses will start marketing campaigns to push products or rebrand themselves.

Whether you’re starting a business or already have one, marketing will be essential to the long-term success of it. Many business owners understand that they need to develop an effective marketing strategy but they’re not sure where to start. A recent study by Safari SEO Brisbane found that the majority of small to medium enterprise businesses invested between 10-15% of net revenue back into the business each monthly through various marketing channels with paid and organic digital marketing initiatives being the most popular mediums.

Read on to learn about some of the most effective trends to use in your marketing strategy.

Customer Experience

As companies are settling into their 2020 plans, improving customer experience has become a priority of many.

Providing quality customer experience is a major part of marketing because it will encourage customers to keep coming back.

As the internet has grown, customers are given a lot more power in terms of what kind of content they’re seeing.

Nowadays, most customers are purchasing products as a result of their research and not advertisements.

When you provide great customer experience, people that are researching your company will see that in reviews and referrals. You can’t tell customers that you have a great product. Instead, you’ll need to show them why what you have to offer is a good investment.

Although many businesses are prioritizing customer experience into their business marketing strategies, they often don’t know what makes a great customer experience.

Quality customer experience consists of these things:

  • Efficiency
  • Convenience
  • Intelligent and Friendly service

By focusing on these, customers will start coming back and recommending your company to others. Consider including easy payment options to further simplify the purchasing process and make customers happier.

Employee Management

Proper employee management goes hand in hand with customer experience. If you have employees that are rude or don’t know what they’re doing, most people will stop doing business with you.

The best way to approach employee management is to develop efficient and effective training programs. If your company has a variety of positions, you’ll need to make training programs for each one. Everyone will need to understand the basics of the business, but put the focus on their role in the company.

For example, you shouldn’t train a cashier how the warehouse of your business works. Instead, ensure that they understand everything there is about being a cashier. This includes both using the teller and interacting with customers.

What you can do if you’re looking to train everyone about a certain subject is how to behave when dealing with customers. When running a store, cashiers aren’t the only people that customers will interact with.

Building a Brand

One of the main concepts of business marketing is building a brand using a variety of methods. Some businesses prefer to advertise their way into mainstream success whereas others like focusing on what their business stands for.

Building a brand is all about creating an image for your company. Many people have the misconception that creating a logo is building a brand for yourself. When you think about companies like McDonald’s, you think about much more than their signature logo.

McDonald’s has managed to build a brand that makes consumers think about their logo, colors, affordability, and employee-customer relationships. When people think about getting quick, cheap food, McDonald’s is one of the first that comes to mind.

This is essentially what you’ll need to do for your business. No matter what industry you’re in, you must focus on what the goal of your business is and how you’ll portray it to customers.

If you had a business that revolves around fitness, you wouldn’t incorporate video games into your image. Instead, you’d focus on healthy food and exercise. You need to make it make sense.

Advertising on Social Media

Out of all the new marketing trends over the past few years, social media has remained one of the most effective. To this date, businesses focus on social media because there are over 3.2 billion active daily users.

Anyone looking to effectively grow their business will need to use social media because putting up physical ads no longer earn you customers.

Putting up posters and billboards slightly increases the chance that someone will see it. The chances of someone looking into your business because of these ads are much less.

When you advertise on social media, you can choose your target audience by selecting a variety of filters. You can go on something like Facebook or Twitter and choose the age range, gender, and location of people you want to see your ads.

Running a social media account is also effective because it will give customers a way to interact with your business outside of cash transactions.

You should also create a website to give customers something to redirect to from your ads. Having a website allows customers to learn more about your business and they can purchase products from it, allowing you to maximize your profits.

If you’re looking to make a name for yourself in the digital world, you can get involved with a digital marketing service. One of the popular services are Climb Online, so consider checking them out if you want help with SEO and social media.

Start Developing Your Marketing Strategy

An effective marketing strategy will allow your business to quickly grow and start earning regular customers. Your strategy should target those that would be interested in your product or service. By using the marketing trends in this article, you’ll quickly make a name for yourself.

We encourage you to start looking into building yourself up on social media. You’ll be able to start interacting with potential customers and you’ll get an idea of what people want. From there, you can start working on creating a great customer experience.

Browse our articles if you’d like to learn more about marketing.

2 Ways You Can Keep Your Employees on Your Side

/in /by

StrategyDriven Management and Leadership Article |Managing Your Workforce|2 Ways You Can Keep Your Employees on Your SideYour employees are your business’s main asset. Without them, the work that you need to get done day in, day out won’t be complete, the money that you need to make in order to turn over a profit won’t get made, and your job will be made ten times harder as you seek to carry your company’s burden alone. Without your workforce, your business is nothing.

For this reason, keeping your employees on your side should be one of your top priorities. Lose your workforce’s trust and loyalty, and you’ll find it increasingly difficult to continue trading.

Here are two surefire ways to keep your employees on your side.

Stick by them when things get tough

Life is not all plain sailing. Everybody comes across hurdles and bumps in the road as they grow and progress further, especially when it comes to their profession.

Unfortunately, this means that even the most skilled and hard working of your employees will, at some point, face some sort of trouble in their career. If you want to keep them on your side, you need to stick by every one of your staff members when things do, in fact, get tough for them. Doing so will showcase just how dedicated you are to them and their ongoing progress in your business. Safe in the knowledge that you have their best interests at heart, your employees will instantly feel more appreciative of you and, thus, more inclined to work harder for you.

One way to stick by your employees is to get them legal assistance whenever they are need of it. Even if they have suffered an injury at work and they are claiming against your negligence, standing by your employees and making sure they get what they deserve will no doubt prove how dedicated you are to them. Bare them no ill-will, get them partnered up with a personal injury lawyer NYC, and make sure that they get is owed to them. If you play ball in this instance, you might even be lucky enough to settle the case out of court.

Be transparent at all times

Transparency is key when seeking to keep your employees on your side. How could you expect anything less? Why would anybody trust you if you’re not straight or truthful with them?

When it comes to establishing transparency in your business, you should:

  • Establish a set of core values
  • Never make selling an end goal
  • Keep your door metaphorically open at all times
  • Be an open book
  • Always seek to respond to your employees in a timely manner
  • Remain open to the opinions and suggestion of others at all times
  • Create a community feel in your workspace (and in your online space, too)

Your employees are the lifeblood of your business. Without them, as comprehensively stated, you have no business. It is essential, then, that you keep them on your side at all times and at all costs. To do this, you should stick by them when things get tough, and you should always be transparent with them.

How Time and Attendance Software Can Help Business Owners and Their Employees

/in /by

StrategyDriven Talent Management ArticleWhat is time and attendance software?

At the lowest resolution time and attendance software is a system that requires employees to manually clock in and out of shifts.

Businesses use it, so they can optimize the hours their employees work and pay them more accurately.

Is it micromanaging?

It is reasonable to assume requiring workers to manually clock in and out of shifts and breaks can send the message their manager doesn’t trust them enough to report the hours they work accurately.

Some managers are hesitant to use time and attendance software because they fear their employees will resent them.

In industries like hospitality and retail where turnover is especially high managers don’t want to give their employees another reason to leave.

Ironically, it’s in industries where workers are paid hourly like hospitality and retail where time and attendance software would prove most useful.

The fact is time and attendance software is so much more than just a system for employees to clock in and out of shifts and the successful implementation of it lies in managers making this clear to employees.

Benefits to managers

Time and attendance software ensures staff only get paid for the time they actually work, by recording when they clock in and out of shifts, thereby eliminating the guesswork and grey areas associated with using manual time sheets.

Additionally managers get real time alerts when staff are late or have not taken required breaks.

The reporting capabilities of time and attendance allow managers to see which of their employees work the most overtime and which of them are routinely late to start their shifts.

Managers also have visibility of early clock-ins and late clock-outs, instances of over & under scheduling, and which employees have taken more than their allocated breaks.

Time and attendance software provides managers with insight they can use to iron out inefficiencies in their business.

Compliance

Given managers know when their staff clock in and out, time and attendance software like OpenSimSim allows employers to set up compliance rulesets to protect their businesses and themselves from workplace legislation.

Compliance rulesets can be set up to ensure staff don’t work too much overtime, take their legally required breaks and get paid accordingly for working overtime, weekends, and public holidays.

Managers have visibility over their compliance warnings so they can stop them before they happen and stay out of legal trouble.

How employees can get in on the action

The benefits of time and attendance software are certainly not lost on employees.

As the reporting aspect of time and attendance software gives managers full visibility of their labor force in real time, employees that are punctual are more likely to be recognized and rewarded for it.

In this same way time and attendance software also guards against employees being over and under scheduled as employers will be able to see if this is the case and work to fix it.

Another foreseeable benefit to employees is the potential for data collected by time and attendance software to be used to create a resume, especially useful for people moving between jobs which require similar skills.

Time and attendance software offers detailed reports of employee punctuality and experience in a given role down to the minute.

These reports can be used by job seekers to prove their and experience and value to future employers in a concrete, verifiable way instead of relying on the vagueness and inherent unreliability of a resume like others.

Final words

There are a lot of time and attendance solutions out there and picking the right one can be tough but the benefits for employers and employees are clear.

It is however important that employees see it as welcome addition, and this can be achieved by managers taking a little time to explain to them what it is and how it will benefit the business before introducing it.