Time for a spring clean?
Time for a spring clean?
After the Easter weekend, we’re full of the joys of spring. Spring is such a positive time of year – often associated with new beginnings and fresh starts.
The same applies to your business. If you feel like you’re stuck in a rut, plodding along or plain struggling, the start of spring is the ideal time to shake things up.
First thing’s first, you’ll need to take a long, hard look at the different areas of your business; identifying where performance is lacking and where improvements need to be made. Is productivity below par? How about employee performance and attitudes? Perhaps your systems are letting you down? Or maybe there simply isn’t enough turnover coming through the door.
It isn’t always immediately obvious where issues lie; and sometimes, problems have become so entrenched, attempting to turn them around can be a real uphill struggle.
We’re always talking to business owners about the importance of performance measurement. Where key performance indicators are in place across the different areas of a business, you’ll know at an early stage when something isn’t quite right. That way, you can look into any anomalies; taking steps to address matters before they get worse.
If you don’t have such measures already in place, it’s never too late! Of course, you’ll still have to tackle the existing issues, which could be a long and difficult process. But putting a set of KPI’s in place can be a useful kick-start to making change – giving you an easy and meaningful way to monitor progress.
Where employees are concerned, putting a number on things can help by providing motivation and something tangible to work towards. We’ve seen this in action – provided they’re achievable, creating numeric targets can have an amazing effect on enacting changes in behaviour, attitude and effort.
Like people, businesses are ever evolving, ever changing, and sometimes unpredictable. As such, there isn’t a magic fix button – it may take a few different changes to have the desired effect.
So let’s finish with a bit of spring-time trivia… what came first – the chicken or the egg? Well, according to Google…two birds that weren’t really chickens created a chicken egg, and hence, we have an answer: The egg came first, and then it hatched a chicken!
The moral of the story – it’s amazing what can happen when you put things together. But you have to have a go in the first place!
For advice from Agenda’s business consultants on how to identify the right performance measurement tools for your business, get in touch.
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