• I have a new video on YouTube: http://tinyurl.com/6nlpaz 5 Steps to Successful Business Leadership #

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I have a new video on YouTube: http://tinyurl.com/6nlpaz 5 Steps to Successful Business Leadership

If your company is one of those organizations that is currently having to lay off some staff to save costs, and which as a result is having problems making sure that everything is being done and taken care of, you might want to try rotating jobs among the employees that are left.

The principle behind job rotation is simple, and as a matter of fact it is practiced frequently in smaller companies. Quite often there are many things that need to be done but it doesn’t make too much sense cost-wise for the company to hire staff to take care of these jobs and these jobs alone. So the jobs are distributed among the staff that the company does maintain.

But of course this isn’t sustainable, far from it – the employees assigned these extra responsibilities will simply get up and leave if they are required to take care of these things long- or even medium-term, on top of their other duties. And when you’re already operating with a bare-bones workforce, the last thing you want is for one of these guys to leave you in the lurch. So what you can do is rotate people through these jobs. Have one person take on the extra responsibilities for a week or two, after which they are turned over to another person, and then another and so on and so forth.

There is one more benefit to this sort of setup, and it’s that it adds to the competency of the people on your team in the medium- to long-term view. Job rotation makes your organization that much more efficient and helps you get by if, say, an employee is absent or is too busy handling a key task to be assigned to take on that particular responsibility. Or even if further cuts in the workforce have to be made…

There exist some misconceptions regarding documented and clearly stated process and procedure manuals. Many people believe only the more technical and/or mechanically-oriented jobs can really benefit from putting their processes and procedures down in manuals, and as a result fail to invest in such productivity tools. This however cannot be further from the truth, because any company – as a matter of fact, EVERY company – can stand to benefit significantly from investing in detailed process and procedure manuals and keeping them up-to-date.

One of the greatest problems of any company is knowledge transfer. This is most noticeable when someone resigns or is let go and the new hire that replaces him or her is hard pressed to get himself or herself up to speed regarding what is expected – and this happens even in cases when a formal turnover has been completed and the old employee’s departure has not been abrupt and has allowed for a “thorough” turnover. Knowledge transfer problems are coming to the fore right now, as companies hard hit by the global financial crisis are forced to reduce their ranks and must ensure that the remaining employees are fully capable of carrying out all the day-to-day tasks.

But it is not only new hires that stand to benefit if and when company processes and procedures are thus published. Documented processes and procedures clearly elaborate the steps that are to be followed in order for employees to be productive, as well as equally clearly deliniating how each process dovetails with other processes. This allows employees to know exactly what is expected of them and how to go about satisfying such expectations, and it increases employees’ understanding of their place within the system. And as such supervisors’ and managers’ jobs are made a little easier, since they do not have to be in constant communication with their staff regarding what they need to do.

Process and procedure documents are always kept as up-to-date as possible, usually by supervisors or managers tasked with such responsibilities. Constant and frequent updates are of course a necessity, as if such documents are not updated they lose their relevance and cannot perform the function for which they exist. Companies that employ such documents can even elect to put them up online instead of printing them out, which is much more practical for companies with teams that are located across different locations.

So if your company has not yet begun to utilize such excellent productivity tools, this is the time to make sure you invest in them. Who knows – process and procedure documentation may be just what your company needs to take it to the top!

Yes, we are undergoing one of the worst crises to rear its ugly head in decades. But that doesn’t mean that you as a business owner have to suffer, or even throw in the towel and close up shop entirely. You just have to learn a couple more tricks and tips to get your business to work even though times are tough.

1. We’ve talked about cost-cutting and being cost-efficient before, including eliminating poor staff and underperformers, and you’re probably already doing it. But please be careful with what you decide to cut down or eliminate altogether. Your budget for marketing is like your business’s jugular vein – if you cut this more than is absolutely reasonable, you risk bleeding out and killing your business. Marketing and getting your customers in touch with your marketing activities should be viewed as an investment, and as a matter of fact it might even be better to increase your marketing budget.

2. Know precisely what to market – focus on your niche and your highest selling products and/or services, and market these aggressively, as aggressively as you can without alienating your customers. Go for the products and/or services that get your company to stand out, because now more than ever you need to make an impact and get through to them. Remember that you are not only selling your products, you are also selling your company, and it gets easier to do so if you already have your foot in the door.

3. In the rush to get new customers, many people forget to maintain their old ones. This can be little short of fatal in many cases, because, as I mentioned in the previous point, it’s much easier to sell to customers you’re already selling to. Plus do NOT forget that unsatisfied customers are many more times likely to spread the (bad) news about you than happy customers. The last thing you need during tough times is a bad rep with potential clients.

4. Make the buying experience easier for potential clients. Go online if you haven’t already. Consider offering to deliver goods purchased right to customers’ doorsteps. Streamline the existing process. If it takes five steps to buy something on your website, for example, think of ways to cut it down to four, or even three, or to speed up the site. If people find it easy and quick to buy from you, it cuts down on the chance that they will think again about their purchase; plus it makes it easier for them to buy from you a second or even a third time.

5. Do you know why your products and/or services are selling? What value do your clients derive from what you sell them? Determine this value and focus on it, so you’ll know what to tweak and what not to touch if and when you decide to try something new.

6. Lastly, take a hard look at your business model. Has it been put through its paces enough for you to be certain that it’s a keeper; does it need tweaking; or it should be thrown out altogether and replaced by a better one? If so, go ahead and do it. Work on your plans’ shortcomings and strive to overcome them.

In biology it’s said that the most successful organisms are the ones that can adapt to get by during tough times, not just flourish when times are good. Learn to do so and you’ll be able to dig in and survive tough times such as these.

In general there are two ways to manage your staff. You can either choose to be very strict with them, watch them like a hawk, crack down on behavior you dislike, and impose “productivity tools” and processes and policies on them to make sure that they toe the company line. This sort of micromanagement might actually result in good output, but the problem is that it’s far from sustainable. Many people refuse to work under such conditions, and you may have to deal with high employee turnover rates. Plus it’s quite taxing on your part and on your managers’ parts as well to be so vigilant.

The second way is far less labor-intensive. You could aim to empower them, to wed them heart and mind to you and the company, and not feel the need to drive them like a team of oxen.

Here are some tips on how to empower your employees and build the kind of team that loves its work so much that you won’t need to micromanage them.

- Build up a corporate culture based on encouragement and trust. Do away with micromanagement – work based on subsidiarity instead (do not seek to do what someone else is doing; manage him, but do not interfere in his work).

- Keep people involved in company activities. Cultivate a culture of openness and transparency.

- Make sure to communicate your mission and vision to everyone, on a daily basis. (You don’t have to go around trumpeting this to the entire staff everyday; incorporate it into your corporate culture. Put up posters, fliers, discussion groups, that sort of thing.)

- Invite people to embark on a journey with you – a journey of self-discovery and self-development, not to mention success for the company.

- Personally help people link their own goals to the company’s goals.

- Encourage people to think like entrepreneurs even if they are employees. Challenge them to think creatively, to experiment, to take risks. Always ask people to think of ways to improve just about everything.

- Have your supervisors and managers view their staff as people who can be developed, and have these people seek to constantly get their staff to grow and improve. Recognize goals and milestones reached. Constantly seek to motivate and inspire your staff.

- Build teams and encourage teamwork, leverage diversity. Encourage group productivity. Build teams. Watch out for overcompetitiveness and staff who are too individualistic that they become disruptive forces.

So which way will you go? Micromanagement or “proper” management? Will you discourage or encourage? It’s completely up to you.

Cohesiveness is defined as the relationship of individual group members to the groups they are part of. It is a key feature of teamwork. In general, cohesiveness stems directly from the fact that people who are closer to one another develop much closer relationships that those who are far apart from each other. People who sit closer to each other, because they are likely to interact both formally and informally, are much more likely to develop cohesiveness than teams spread out across a wide area and/or with non-team members located between them.

Studies have discovered that cohesiveness is directly related to cooperation. When all members of a group cooperate in order for that group to succeed at any task or goal, the cohesiveness of that team can be said to be extremely high. As a matter of fact, the ability to form close friendships at one’s workplace is an excellent sign that the workplace is a productive one. (This of course stems directly from the fact that they are located close to one another and can interact easily at both informal and formal levels.)

If group cohesiveness is high, then it naturally follows that:

a) Each member of the group is more satisfied when he is with his groupmates than he would be were he not a member of the group, or if he were in a group with lower cohesiveness;

b) Communication between the members of the group is significantly more frequent and may not be solely related to work-related matters;

c) Productivity, both of each individual member and the group as a whole, is commensurately higher as well, because people who are comfortable with one another work better than those who are less at ease with each other;

d) Group norms can be enforced more effectively than in less cohesive teams, since the pressure to conform is greater than in teams which are less integrated, which may mean that teams or groups may require less intensive policing by management; and

e) There is a certain amount of hostility of group members to non-group members since they are so well integrated (this may of course require some management to prevent it from becoming problematic).

Ultimately, however, whether extremely cohesive teams actually result in increased productivity or not depend on the leadership and management skills of those in charge (which are also necessary to counter the final point brought up above). It is very easy for poorly regimented and managed teams to neglect work in favor of socialization, and to engage in overly competitive behavior vis-à-vis other teams that will do the company no good even in the short term. Good management skills and practices must therefore be brought to the fore to ensure that cohesive teams work to the company’s – and their own – benefit.

Competency-based training is a much more personalized, individual and systematic approach to training than more usual or accepted training methods. It revolves around the mastery of specific knowledge or skills required for the job at hand, and is participant- or employee-centered. By stark contrast, progression in the traditional learning system revolves around the timeframe of the curriculum, as well as the teacher him- or herself.

Competency-based training focuses on two important concepts: skills, which are tasks or group of tasks set as important and which are performed to specific levels of proficiency or competency (and which can either be physical skills or knowledge-based skills); and competencies themselves, which are skills that are performed to specific standards.

Programs designed to build competency provide their participants with learning activities that are geared to help them master each task. They are personalized such that each participant can decide to vary his pace or even stop altogether as he or she deems necessary in order to learn in a manner that works best for him or her. Feedback is also provided periodically throughout the program, and participants always have the opportunity to adjust as they go along to maximize the learning experience.

At each stage of the process, each participant is given a certain amount of time to master or perfect each task – the tasks must be performed to a certain level of competency or proficiency – before he or she can move on to succeeding tasks in the program.

And even after the program ends, companies that have adopted competency-based training systems have also adopted more clearly stated work outcomes that are clearly connected to the competencies introduced during the training program, in order to maximize the learning and emphasize its importance to the participants.

The adoption of competency-based training can thus make quite a difference in your workplace, as it has the potential to increase your company’s productivity – certainly more than traditional training methods given that competency-based training is all about focusing on the skills and competencies your employees need to be able to do their jobs properly.

God knows work is complex enough as it is. Yet there is a certain type of person who makes his or her work-life too complex for his or her own good. These are the key characteristics of these people:

• They over-analyze things, ostensibly to be able to make the best decisions, but end up being unable to move forward as a result (“analysis paralysis”).

• They seemingly refuse to perform tasks the simplest way possible and insist on embellishing even the easiest tasks until they become major tasks.

• They choose to work on too many things concurrently and operate on too many levels for them to ever get anything done well – or done at all, in some extreme cases.

• They can’t stay focused on their key goals or strategies for the day, not to mention those for the month, quarter or year, and end up veering off every time something interesting presents itself.

• They are panicky, flighty, and over-emotional – most often they are the sort who take criticism or even comments too personally.

• As a consequence they require too much supervision than is good for management, or upper management in some cases.

The end result, of course, is chaos, confusion, distraction, stress – and low productivity levels.
By contrast, the quieter, more level-headed worker, even when faced with the most complicated, convoluted concepts, automatically takes them apart, discards the fluff, and focuses on what is key. They are able to efficiently deal with even the heaviest workloads because they are flexible.

In a nutshell, the lesson here that everyone must learn is that the key to getting work done, whether short-, medium- or long-term, is manifold:

• Know your goals and what you are trying to achieve. It may help to note them down on a piece of paper and place them somewhere within eyeshot so that you can easily be reminded of what you are trying to achieve.

• Ignore what adds no value to your goals or to you yourself. Learn to automatically filter out these distractions and impediments.

• That said, be flexible and open to the possibility that your priority list may change several times throughout the day. Inflexibility is another problem altogether.

• Also be ready and willing to improve yourself by recognizing new problem-solving methods and learning them when they pop up.

We put so much of a premium on processes and policies to boost our own productivity and that of others as well, but we end up forgetting how much of a factor work environment is when you are trying to get you and your people to come up with the best work.

Many people think that in the interest of reducing costs, any old office and any sort of equipment and furnishings will do, and that they and their staff can simply adjust to anything that’s short of physically hazardous. People may well be able to adapt to such situations, but they may not be happy in an unattractive, poorly designed office, and if an opportunity at a more comfortable, more welcoming office beckons, they may well elect to pull up roots and leave you in the lurch. In addition, an uncomfortable, unappealing office is a major disincentive if you are trying to attract good talent.

Whether you’re setting up a new office or want to refurbish an existing one, focus on these three considerations.

Comfort . Uncomfortable employees are unproductive employees. And you and your supervisory or management staff will also have to work twice as hard to get them to be productive. Everyone thus suffers as a result. Pay attention to your office’s ergonomics.

a. Make sure that the chairs are comfortable and that they position everyone at the correct height and angle to do long-haul computer work without discomfort. Chairs should be sized right for their occupants; they must support the back and should be uniformly comfortable without being too much so, for obvious reasons.

b. Desks should also be spaced to fit the people who use them. They need to be finished nicely – no rough edges that can injure people.

c. Keyboards and monitors must be at the correct height and angle.

Convenience. Your office layout must also be shaped to fit how you and your team works. Aside from following established safety procedures (keeping wires away from high-traffic areas, or concealing them safely – that sort of thing), make sure that people have filing and storage systems that are easy to access and flexible as well to accommodate changes.

Enjoyment and relaxation. Don’t be inhumane and lock your staff in a colorless gray box. Give them windows so that they can see outside and let the sun in from time to time. Allow for plants and flowers, and maybe even an aquarium to bring a touch of nature into the work area. The sound of flowing water can help people relax, as can the judicious use of scented candles or sprays. Allow for a pantry or other such socializing area where people can sit, have coffee, talk, and relax in their spare time, not just a watercooler or coffee machine – as a matter of fact some people may actually do better work here than in more structured work areas, so you may want to allow them to do so.

Back all these up with supporting policies – allow people to take naps during lunch breaks, and have them stand up and stretch at least once every hour to stave off such debilitating disorders as cramps or, worse, carpal tunnel syndrome.

Lastly, you may need to establish usage protocols and procedures and policies, where necessary, to protect this equipment and prevent people from abusing them or damaging them in any way. And you will need to take care of all this equipment to make sure that they’re always in tip-top shape and ready whenever people will need to use them.