For business managers, it can sometimes be difficult to create policies and procedures that allow for the efficiency that they’d like to see from their business. Business growth leads to more complex situations which in turn demand more complex procedures. This enhanced complexity can not only get constant in that you need to alter the way things are done, you also could fall into the trap of mistakenly putting productivity roadblocks up that can alter the way your business operates.
Lots of businesses are facing a financial crunch as the margins they operate under continue to shrink. This unfortunate trend has led a lot of businesses to outsource elements of their operations to try and cut costs. One part of the business that is either outsourced or cut out entirely has been the human resources department.
All successful businesses want to grow and better themselves, as growth is a direct indicator that you are doing something right, from providing better services to your customers or servicing more customers. If you’re not ready to adapt to this growth, you’re in for a difficult time. Here are three ways you can keep your business operating even when you’re experiencing unprecedented growth.
Businesses can now capture and use more data to help them run an efficient business than ever before. That’s not to say a lot of businesses actually do. In this month’s newsletter, we thought we’d discuss the use of data and how it can be used to improve your business.
Not everyone is cut out to be an entrepreneur, largely because there’s a lot that can pop up and cause problems that need to be addressed. Let’s discuss how successful business owners rally through tough times to help attain this kind of success.
Technology advances at an incredible rate, and the successful business has much work to do in order to keep up with it. How does your organization’s ability to change and adapt hold up compared to your competitors? This concept, dubbed business agility, is of critical importance in today’s fast-paced business environment, and if you aren’t prepared to assess it, you might be falling behind the competition.
Your business’ technology is a great tool, or at least it can be. Like any other part of business, getting value out of your business’ technology is essential. In order for you to see the kind of value from your tech that you’d expect, you first need to approach it by making good decisions. This month, we wanted to go over a few ways that you could fall into a trap with your IT.
It might be an understatement to suggest that things don’t always go smoothly in business. The truth is that when one problem is solved, another is often created. This is why we lean on our technology. These “solutions” are intended to fix many of the speedbumps, but that doesn’t mean that choosing, deploying, and supporting these systems don’t come with some problems as well. Today, we look at three reasons an IT project could fail.
Running a business can be stressful, and if you can’t find time to juggle the countless variables that are at play every day of the week, you’ll quickly find yourself falling behind what needs to be done. Technology is one such area where falling behind is easy, especially when it comes to purchasing and implementing new tools. Unfortunately, your IT budget is not limitless, so how can you make the most of it? Let’s take a look.
We all know the importance of IT maintenance and management when it comes to effectively running a business, but it’s really hard to ensure that your technology is being properly maintained when your staff have one foot out the door. A new survey from Gartner suggests that IT employees are more likely to leave your business than other non-IT employees, and this puts a heavier burden on you to make sure technology is properly taken care of.
The COVID-19 pandemic is still in full swing, and while many companies buckled under the pressure put on them to maintain operations, others have managed to adapt through the use of remote technology solutions. Businesses have put into place policies surrounding this remote technology, many of which are both helpful and harmful.
When considering a continuity plan for your business, you need to consider some scenarios that may not ever happen. This is called risk management and it is the basis of keeping your business up and running regardless of the situations that it encounters. This month, we thought we would outline some of the variables that need to be addressed when creating a comprehensive business continuity plan.
Businesses use technology to varying degrees, but even small businesses have a lot of technology that must be tracked on a daily basis. With so many devices floating around the office, how are you making sure that you know who has which device, when it was issued, and how it’s being used? We suppose the question is not “how” you are keeping track of it all, but “if.” For this task, we recommend implementing an inventory tracking system for your business’ technological assets.
For a worker, one of the most maddening things that can happen at work is when there is a lack of consistency with the leadership. It can throw a figurative wrench into everything that you are trying to accomplish. Some examples of people not being consistent include:
Making solid business decisions can sometimes be confusing. Not that you try to make anything other than good decisions, but a lot of business is, and has always been, trial and error; and, you may know this from experience, error happens to be a big part of it. Today, we thought we would discuss what goes into good technology decisions and how many times it comes down to the results.
There is no question that the COVID-19 pandemic has had no small impact on the way that business is conducted. A considerable part of that impact is directed toward the technology that powers these businesses. One way or another, the way that businesses use their technology is bound to be influenced before all this is over.
For the months that COVID-19 has been around, everyone has done all they can to hold on to their business. They have closed down, they have closed their offices and forced their employees to work from home, they have borrowed money and scaled back or eliminated their 2020 plans. It would be nice if all that sacrifice would pay off, but the frustrating reality is that there is going to be a lot of sustained discomfort for a lot of business owners. Let’s take a look at some things small business owners should consider as they reopen their businesses.
One of the most effective methods to boost employee productivity is to encourage your workforce to work together in order to achieve their goals. Workplace collaboration allows multiple employees to combine their efforts and energies into a common project, adding value to the final product and often completing it more quickly. The benefits don’t end there, either. Here are some of the other advantages gained by encouraging collaboration among your workforce.
Increased Efficiency
As the old saying goes, two heads are better than one. With multiple people actively pursuing a common goal, progress toward that goal can move along much quicker than if a lone worker had to complete it independently.
Greater Engagement Between Employees
Workplace collaboration solutions tie the entire office closer together, even if some of your employees aren’t technically “in” the office. Connecting office employees with their remote-working teammates will help your remote workers feel like they are still involved and valued--and allow your in-house employees to benefit from their input as well.
Of course, your in-house team members can experience the positive effects of collaboration as well. Having employees share ideas also encourages them to build off of each other’s successes, and will often result in a sense of camaraderie among team members.
Initiating New Employees
One of the fastest methods for a new employee to learn what they are supposed to do is to learn it from an experienced coworker. The other method is to dive right into it. Collaboration solutions offer the opportunity for a new employee to do both as they and the more experienced team member work together to complete the task at hand.
These are just a few brief samplings of the many benefits a company can enjoy once collaboration has become a part of the office culture. The question now is, how does one go about encouraging collaboration in the first place?
Lead By Example...
First of all, if your employees see you extolling the benefits of collaborative work while never participating in it yourself, they are apt to disregard your recommendations and continue to go about their work on their terms. However, if you demonstrate the value of collaborative work by initiating it with your workers, you prove not only that it does present benefits to business operations, but also that you are serious about implementing it.
… but Know When to Step Aside
As a leader, you will need to be cognizant of when to back off and trust your employees to do what they have to do. Micromanaging a project and trying to force collaboration on your employees will result in the opposite effect that you were hoping for, wasting time and reducing their morale. Have faith that your employees are capable of doing the job you hired them to do with minimal direction.
Let Your Employees Speak Up
Make sure that your employees have a forum to voice their ideas and concerns. A big part of collaboration is the ability for each team member to contribute to solving problems that an organization encounters. Give them a way to share their ideas for improvement and acknowledge each idea as a viable option. This will bring the team closer and create a more cohesive workplace.
Demonstrate the Benefit to the Employee, Not Just the Company
Presumably, your workforce is made up of human beings, which means that at least some portion of them will, when presented with the idea of collaboration, think to themselves, “What’s in it for me?” This is not the time to focus exclusively on how internal collaboration will be of benefit to the company. You should also mention how much easier collaboration can make their jobs, making the benefits personal and professional, and in turn making them more likely to embrace collaborative work.
If you’ve found success in increasing collaboration in your workplace, let us know how in the comments below.
While many different people open businesses, the primary reason that they all do so is to make money. A positive cash flow is essential if the business is to generate funds that support a cause or provide a decent living. However, to collect this cash flow, a business must have their invoices returned. As it happens, this doesn’t often occur in a timely manner.
Whether you own a business or work for one, you need the business to make money so you can make money and settle your finances and debts. This becomes challenging when the status quo dictates that payment terms can stretch the time for an invoice to be paid to up to three months. This delay between the transaction and the actual payment has led to many operational difficulties in many businesses.
There’s a good chance that you know about this from firsthand experience, as these difficulties are exceptionally common. Estimates have attributed 5 percent of the national gross domestic product to unpaid invoices. 81 percent of invoices are past due by 30 days or more, with the average small business waiting for approximately $84,000 to come in from invoices that have yet to be paid. This average business also only has about 27 days of assets saved.
Added up, estimates say that businesses were owed $825 billion in unpaid invoices in 2016.
It is pretty clear that outstanding invoices are a considerable problem for small businesses, and in some cases medium-sized establishments as well. Improvement and innovation simply can’t happen if all of a business’ funds are tied up in sustaining themselves as they wait for payment. When was the last time you had to postpone something as you waited for money to be available for it?
However, sometimes you have to spend money in order to make money. With the services we offer at The Connection, Inc, you can have your capital spend reduced by budgeting your IT costs into a predictable monthly rate. We’ll provide you with software that can help you keep track of from where, and when, you should expect a payment.
For more information about line of business applications and the other solutions we have available, give us a call at (732) 291-5938.
As a business adopts certain “best practices,” it is important for business leaders to consider why they are adopted, and more importantly, are they really for the best? There are many problems that subscribing to false best practices can produce, and so it becomes important to identify, adjust, and resolve them.
The term “best practices” is used exceptionally often in business communications, blogs, and other messages, to the point that it is fair to say that the term is bandied about just for the sake of using it. However, so much stake is placed in what is considered “best practice” that whatever is purported to be best is accepted without any further examination.
In his recent book, Breaking Bad Habits: Defy Industry Norms and Reinvigorate Your Business, and in an interview with the Harvard Business Review discussing this publication, Professor Freek Vermeulen discusses this phenomenon.
In the interview, the subject of reverse benchmarking is brought up, and with it, the example presented by Capitec. Capitec is a bank in South Africa that leveraged reverse benchmarking in order to cement their place in their market.
Reverse benchmarking is where you examine the standard practices of your particular industry in order to determine how one can do better, often by abandoning what other businesses treat as status quo. Returning to the Capitec example, Capitec observed that the other banks in South Africa were closing at 4 o’clock in the afternoon. In response to this, Capitec extended their hours to allow those who are employed to attend to their banking after work, and many of their branches have Saturday hours as well.
This is just one example of how “best practices” may not always be “best” for all businesses. However, when many businesses are questioned specifically regarding their supposed best practices, the response is often some variation of “this is what is safe and/or comfortable, and this is the way it has always been done.” According to Vermeulen, this is a good sign that there needs to be an examination into whether or not an organization is subscribing to practices because they are truly helpful, or if they are just stuck to the status quo.
There is also the danger of assuming that, because a company became successful by doing something, that something is a best practice. Vermeulen brought up the possibility that the companies who have reached the top have done so by following risky strategies and lucked out, while the vast majority of companies who did the same thing they did ultimately failed and died out in obscurity.
Vermeulen also acknowledges that changing an established practice is not an easy conclusion for many businesses to come to. According to him, companies will wait as long as they can before they make a change out of necessity--when they begin to see productivity and profitability suffer--but by then, change is more difficult to make.
This is why Vermeulen offers this advice: “Be proactive.”
By evaluating your business and establishing what actually works and--more importantly--what doesn’t, you can identify weak points and resolve them before they cause your business too much trouble.
The Connection, Inc can do the same for your IT, evaluating your systems and network to ensure that everything is up to standard. Give us a call at (732) 291-5938 for more information.
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