There’s no business owner that will be pleased with stunt business growth. Every Business man’s dream is to see that the business attains its highest possible height. In the face of stiff competition and market challenges, it is imperative that business owners revisit their priorities.
Of the many different components and resources of a business, the human resources are most dynamic and important. You may have a large capital and outstanding site or prospects for a business but if your staff is getting the best assistance they can to effectively play their part in the business, there is going to be maximum waste of resources and time to achieve very little. On the other hand, though, a properly managed staff would make the best out of inadequate resources.
So many business owners concentrate on their business development forgetting those who cause the business development to happen, the staff. They can either make or mar a business if care is not taken. To prepare your staff for business expansion, you should consider and engage in the following.
Prioritizing the Human Resource Department
At the very helm of every business is the team put in place to manage the most important resource of the business – the human resource. Even if you have just a sales boy and have to supervise him alone, you still have to consider yourself as human resource manager and make sure you give him the best assistance available to deliver the best service he can.
For large businesses though, with several workers, the staff becomes even more important. There is usually a process through which products and services undergo before they get to customers. Consequently, every single worker linked to that chain must be equipped and assisted to deliver the very best they can. Here are some important tips and recommendations to consider in making sure you get the best out of your staff.
1. The Power of Re enforcers
Many at times, in small Growing businesses, employees are always given jobs that more persons would have done in an already expanded business to a single person because of the size of the business. As an employer, you should always appreciate the efforts of your employee. Celebrate their strengths and encourage them in areas where they are weak.
Praising and commending workers, and indeed anyone is magical in its effects. When you praise a staff for one good act, it boosts him up and creates an eager desire to do more in order to receive more of such praise. On the other hand, if you always criticize every effort your staff makes, you harm their ego thereby reducing the productivity. This will hinder Business Expansion.
As a business owner, you can motivate your staff with an incentive to appreciate good deeds and tireless efforts. Every staff who receives such incentive would make sure to push up their performance in order to keep receiving the benefits. Incentives also make lazy workers to buckle-up and come out of their laziness. Once your staff has some reward they can look forward to for putting in more effort and increasing performance in a growing business there is bound to be business expansion.
Note that by giving out incentives to deserving staff, you have mapped out a Business Plan that will bring about Business Development
2. Plan with Staff the Future
One Growth Strategies for a growing business is to include your staff in planning for the future of the business. You can always draw out a business expansion plan with your staff and make them see their place in the future of the business. This will encourage them to work extremely hard in order to attain the future you planned together. When your staff is involved in planning they have the feeling that the business belongs to them too and will make a better commitment.
On the other hand, if your staff do not see themselves in the future of your business, they will see no reason to push-up a growing business to the next level. When you don’t involve your employee in the business planning process, he will be blind to the future and will see no reason to put in extra efforts into business.
3. Employer Employee bond
Relationship is the bases for any union in life. For two people to work together in peace and harmony, there needs to be a cordial relationship between them. Therefore as an employer or business owner, one Growth Strategy you need to use in the Business Planning Process is relating cordially with your staff. Be more concerned about bonding with your staff than just getting the best out of them. There are usually two reasons why people commit to their work better. One is because of their commitment and passion to the job, the other is because of the connection they have with the employer or fellow staff members. So your staff might sacrifice a lot to make a business grow not for anything but for the relationship you build with them.
4. Employer Altitude towards the Business
So many Growing Businesses are not always considered important by the owners because of their humble beginning days. Such business owners do not pay attention to or place value on their business. However, employees pick up their pace and determine the value they place on a business from their employers. As you dedicate yourself to your business, you automatically teach employees to do same. Consider for example a business owner who can hardly wait for work time to elapse before he or she is rushing out of the office. He feels the job is a burden and the staff can’t help but put up the same attitude on the job. Your staff will hardly neglect the business when they can see how passionate and committed you are to it.
5. On the Job Training
The trend in demand and desires for goods and services change with time and recently that change seems to have become much more frequent than use to be the case. As an employer, you need to be proactive. Closely examine market trends and determine before time where your employees have to learn more and be better.
You might have hired a staff before certain upgrades had taken place and your staff was trained to do it the old way. It is in your place to send your staff to learn the new trends and skills that will help take the business to its next level.
6. Upgrading Working Environment
Better working appliances will always enhance quality of work done. A comfortable working environment will ensure that job performance it enhanced. As an employer, you need to make sure to give your staff the best working equipment needed to do their job faster. So to say, if you want to enhance business growth, you have to move your business to an advance stage by moving working equipment and upgrading work environment to the next level.
Your infrastructure also needs to be worked on. Let your infrastructure be good enough to contain and portray a good image both for your staff and the business.
7. Avoid Misused Resources
When there is misuse of business resources, the staffs of the business are always put in a tight corner and when a person is in such a condition he can’t perform. When the resources in a business are well managed, every department in that business will function properly thereby enhancing Business Growth.
8. The Power of consistent Salary
In business, when the owner always has the interest of the staff at heart, the staff will also have the business of the employer at heart. The most effective way to show that you care about your staff and have their interest at heart is looking to their welfare. A person’s welfare is ensured when he has a steady income flow.
When a worker goes on for months without pay, the enthusiasm to do his/ her best is reduced. Soon your workers begin to turn up for work every morning with just enough passion to make it through the day’s work hours. When workers are sure to receive pay after doing a job, they are encouraged to keep working. So as an employer who wants business development you should make sure to pay your staff fully and on time. You shouldn’t be inconsistent in payment dates and in the amount your staff receives.
9. Job Description
Many employers get employees to work in a business without properly defining their description. So a staff is assigned to this duty today and tomorrow to the next. When you keep doing that, you get the staff confused as to what he has been employed to do. Always note that the more you do a particular job, the more you gain experience in that particular duty and the more you can produce in that duty. So you should define the job of your employee and make sure they stick to their particular jobs. By so doing, the gain more skills within their job specifications and learn better and faster ways to complete tasks.
10. Set Daily Objectives
Many Businesses are always stagnant or falling because of the lack of Business objectives. As a business owner with the aim of enhancing business development, you need to clearly state what short and long term objectives are. You can implement daily weekly and even monthly objectives for your business.
When setting these objectives, you need to make sure they are realistic and attainable. On the one hand, objectives should not be the easiest thing to attain. On the other hand they should not seem impossible. They should be just good enough to push your staff to put in more efforts into the business. When you set daily, weekly and monthly objectives for your business, your staff is bound to work hard to meet up with these objectives thereby working hard for your Business development.
11. Staff Hiring
The staff of a business is the working hand of that business. The more the staff, the more the force of your business. Therefore, as a business owner, always try to employ as many workers as your business can afford. When a business has adequate staff, it is bound to produce more. It is said that “many hands do light work.” Always note that if there is more efficient production of goods and services there is bound to be Business Development.
This is a very powerful business strategy that can push up your business forward in rapid development. But be mindful of the capacity of your business because if you end up employing more staff than the capacity of your business, you might enter unconsciously into your capital to be able to pay the over staffed business and this will not be good for Business Development.
12. Transparency
It should be noted the staff will always copy the attitude of their employer into the business. If you are an employer who is not transparent about the running of the business, you will always create loop holes and encourage your staff to get into corrupt practices which in the long run will prove detrimental to the business. However, being very clear with your transactions, you leave no space or platform for your staff to carry out malpractices.
Always be clear with your employee about income and expenditures of the business and how the business is run. Always treat staff with equity. Avoid favoritism amongst your staff. Love all of them, correct all of them and sanction all of them if the fall short or misbehave at any time. Do not let them have the impression that you love some particular ones more than others without a reason. Always explain to them the reason for all your actions so they are clear as to what you expect from them.
13. Always Embrace Flexibility
Often times it is tempting to hold on to those methods you have used over years but times change and methods change with it. As a leader of the business you have to bear in mind that the responsibility of a trail blazer lies on your shoulders and trailblazers are flexible to change.
Be open to new ideas on how to enhance business development. You cannot possibly know it all. Let your employees chip in ideas and state what they think should be done to make things better and increase output. After all they are the ones closely engaged with the real task and can better see where corrections need to be made.
Carry out research on the quality of your goods and services and always make modifications. Give a listening ear to the suggestions from your staff on how the think quality of goods and services can be improved to cause growth in your business. Appreciate all suggestions, even those you are sure you will not use.
Welcome innovation and positive ideas. Always ask for advice from your most trusted and efficient staff in decision making especially when it concerns the running of the business. When you are open to information that concerns your business, you are bound to encounter information or ideas that will catapult your business to its peak, thereby enhancing Business Expansion.
14. Share Proceeds of Growth
As an employer, it is normal to let employees enjoy the growth of the business. When the total income of a business increases, it is good for the profits to flow down to the employees (staff). This can be done through increase in their salaries, incentives, end of year gifts or even an organizing an end of year party, where you have a leisure time with your staff.
When this is done you realize that the working spirit of your staff is boosted and their eagerness to work must have increased. Watch and see the performance of your staff in the next working or business year. But on the other hand, if you are selfish and want to enjoy all extra benefits of the business alone, your workers (staff) won’t have any reason to work out of their scope to make the business expand.
15. Staff evaluation
It is important that you constantly check the growth rate of your staff. There are some staffs who are very stagnant and rigid. There are also others who learn the business very fast and grow in it fast too. Always encourage and reward business staffs who can grow with the growing business so that those who are slow can pick up the pace. Those who grow very fast in a business have a high tendency of fostering Business development and growth for the business. Note those who are slow to adapt to changes and seek to figure out how you can help them pick up.
16.The Employee you Employed
There are some employees who go for a job because they need to earn money and there are others who apply for a job because they have a passion for that job. As a business owner it is always good to go for the employee who is passionate about the job. Such an employee will enjoy rendering that particular service for your business which can bring innovations for the business and also bring about development and growth in that business. On the other hand, employees who have no passion for the job have little to offer to the business, hence they prove to be a liability to the business. This is to say the kind of employee, staff, you surround your business with will determine the growth rate of your business.
17. Employee – Employee bond
It is always very good when staffs working in a particular business are in a perfect relationship. When the working environment is friendly, the staff feels free in the work environment and they can also work with a free spirit. As an employer, you can encourage this bond between staff by employing the following methods.
You can create groups amongst workers and give particular assignment to carry which will enable them to spend more time together, reason together and also come out with conclusions. This will build a strong bond between them which will in turn increase productivity.
After creating such employee groups, you can set inter-group competitions which are strictly linked to production of goods and services. This competition should push each group to work very hard. But note that you should always reward the winning group but the loosing group will be encouraged to work hard in order to win next time.
Make sure you always inter-change members of groups to avoid friction between groups. That is to say so that every staff should be able to interact with each other at a particular point in time.
18. Out of work place trips
People may always think that they are having the best job experience until they move to other places and have other experiences. Staff may think their own approach to work is the best until they go to other businesses and see other staff using different approaches in their own business with better results.
You can always organize work trips to companies and businesses you know are doing really better than yours and take them as a role model to follow and achieve your own objectives. Take your staff to such places and let them interact and learn how the staffs of the other business operate. You can also learn how their system functions. This will help you a great deal in putting in place your growth strategy in place and which will surely cause your growing business to experience a great deal of Business development.
You can also organize leisure parties within your business like end of year parties to celebrate the success made in your business that year, Christmas parties and as many others as you can think of. When you do this, you unite your staff and make them to be more like a family.
When your staff put in extra efforts to bring development to your business, it is your duty to make them happy too so that they will be able to do more and more to make the business keeps developing.
19.The necessity of Hierarchy
In a business or organization there needs to be hierarchical differences amongst the employee and workers. For you to succeed in this, you need to use various criteria include the following,
-Work experience,
- Educational levels,
- longevity in service and any other you can think of.
The essence of this is to create the sense of accountability. There needs to be the sense of responsibility and someone to make sure the responsibilities given to the staff are all carried out perfectly. As an employer you cannot cross check all the jobs and businesses and the staffs in details but you need to have someone whom you can hold responsible for all that happens in the business. When there is proper accountability, there is bound to be Expansion in the business.