Personal Finance

Tips to run your business smoothly and efficiently

management

Lisa, a medium-sized company owner was getting frustrated due to the issues she was facing in her company. She was having a high turnover rate because most hires didn’t fit in their roles or in the company culture leading to them leaving without proper notice.

The employees were disengaged and were not performing. She was experiencing a lot of missed deadlines from employees due to poor work done. Employees were reporting to work late and there was hire absenteeism. There was low staff motivation and morale and a lot of conflicts kept coming up. This environment also affected the engaged employees making the workplace toxic for them.

As a result, Lisa found herself losing a lot of business and her brand was destroyed. She was always tired from picking up poorly work done by staff. She found herself always firefighting. She spent a lot of time and money replacing employees and training them. With all this, she lacked time to focus on the business and she was losing a lot of money.

When I listened to Lisa, I realised that most small and medium sized-companies struggle when it comes to streamlining processes in their company and mostly it is because they do not have clear structures in place making running the business difficult.

I told Lisa that she should have considered having clear standard operating procedures (SOPs) that would have ensured that the services in her company were delivered consistently all the time, which would have eased her work by standardising the processes in her organisation and help guide her employees on how work needs to be done and completed, which would have saved her brand.

The other documents would have been HR Policies and Procedures to help her manage the behaviours of employees and provide clarity on issues such as working hours, leave days and disciplinary process. This would have given her peace of mind knowing she is compliant with the employment act and having her staff know what is expected of them.

What Lisa did not also realise is that if she had the best talent that fitted the roles she was looking to fill and the organisational culture, then her business would have worked much better.

This is because the right employees are engaged, motivated and their productivity is high. They are committed to the business and are loyal. For Lisa, this would have meant having a high retention rate saving them time and money she spent recruiting, training and onboarding.