It’s common knowledge that being a business owner requires you to wear several hats, especially at the beginning of your entrepreneurial journey. Starting a business requires a unique juggling act between many areas of the operation. However, as you grow, taking on too many roles can do your business more harm than good.

When to delegate.

When delegating work the rule of thumb is to hand over tasks that fall outside your area of expertise. If you have limited knowledge or skills to perform a certain task, chances are you will waste time and be less productive than someone who is better trained in that area (The result of which would be a half-baked outcome). Further, the time taken up for these assignments could have been used for more important and productive activities, such as innovation or networking. Some of the roles that you can consider delegating include:

• Online Marketing – This encompasses the management of your website and social media accounts, as well as digital marketing campaigns and initiatives. Large companies typically have an entire department dedicated to online marketing. Because there is so much involved these tasks can become very tedious and time-consuming.
• Customer Service – Engaging with customers is crucial to the success of your business. Customer service encompasses assisting customers with their needs pre, during and post-sale. Like online marketing, this can be a full-time job especially if you want to do well by your customers. If this is becoming the case, it may be time to bring someone else in to assist with answering customer inquiries, developing loyalty or gratitude programs, and sometimes physically attending to customers’ needs.
• Reporting – A business has many moving parts and it’s critical to monitor each of its facets to ensure that these are running properly. These include such areas as finance, sales and marketing, human resource and operations. Reports help you as a business owner to have a feel of his or her current business state and the information can then be used to plan for the next financial year. Tracking all of these can easily leave a business owner with no time for anything else. By assigning this task to someone else, the business owner can concentrate on other, more important areas of the business.

Things that you should be doing.

There are certain things that either shouldn’t be delegated or are too personal to hand over. There will be areas that only the business owner will be able to do effectively until the business has reached a certain level of growth. Some of these owner sensitive areas are listed below.

• Product Development (Innovation) – Innovation is key to maintaining and growing your customer base. If you keep offering your customers what you’ve started with, chances are that they will get bored or find a better alternative. Constantly updating your products and expanding your product range will give your customers something to look forward to.
• Hiring – Hiring the wrong people can be costly for your business. The vetting process is time-consuming but necessary for finding the person that would be the perfect fit for your business. The business owner is the best judge of whether or not a candidate is right for the job he or she is applying for. It is also the job of the business owner to set goals and key performance indicators (KPIs) for each employee. Once your business has grown to a point where recruitment and HR are becoming a full-time job, then it may be time to consider hiring a HR specialist, however until then, this responsibility should fall with the business owner.
• Budget – The budget of a business for all its activities is usually guided by its previous or forecasted revenues. However as the business owner, you can make tweaks here and there depending on the goals and priorities that you have set for your business. Whatever these may be, the business owner ultimately needs to decide the best use of the business’ available funds and where best to allocate these.
• Strategy – The business owner should no doubt be on top of the overarching business direction and strategy of the business. The strategy is an extension of the vision which the business owner has set prior (seeking help from experts in strategy development can be wise).  Decisions ultimately fall on the hands of the business owner and rightfully so.
• Networking – Networking has many benefits for a business and should be given time and attention. Through networking, a business owner can make connections, get referrals, stumble upon opportunities and increase brand awareness. There is no better person to network than the person who knows the ins and out of the business.

Running a business is not easy. It has many moving parts and each part needs attention in order to function efficiently. As much as you may want to take control of every part of your business, it is not advisable to do so as your business grows. It is best to delegate activities that fall outside of your expertise, as this way you can be assured of achieving your desired results while not wasting your valuable time. The best use of your time is to oversee the core functions of the business – the sensitive functions that only the business owner can do effectively.

The post The business owner’s guide to smart delegation appeared first on Reload Consulting.

This has been a popular topic in the business space, whereby the correlation between a company’s effective time management (i.e. productivity) and its success, is glaringly clear. Therefore, the obviousness of these concepts can make it particularly frustrating when your team’s list of tasks only seem to grow larger without progress and you lose that ever-satisfying feeling of running a Biro pen across a, particularly nagging task!

So how can you, as a manager or team lead, increase the productivity in your team?  Below are some tips we have compiled based on our experience in a fast-paced working environment and from supporting research.

Tip 1. Give specific directions and objectives.

Keep in mind that employees are not mind readers.  To be able to manage expectations on both sides, make sure to discuss the details of each task carefully including the task objectives, timelines and measurements/deliverable. Be sure to give clear instructions and give your staff the opportunity to ask questions.

Tip 2. Encourage priority setting.

It is easy to get overwhelmed by the number of tasks at hand. According to the Pareto Principle, only 20% of what a person does in a day really matters and in fact, that 20 % of tasks produce 80% of the results.  Simply said, learning to prioritise tasks is key to accomplishing and producing quality work instead of getting caught up in less important tasks.

There are many useful tools that business owners, managers and members of the staff can use to aid in prioritisation. Two of our favourites are the Eisenhower box and the plain and simple To Do List. In using the Eisenhower box, tasks are organised using a decision matrix. The matrix is divided into four quadrants: urgent and important, important but not urgent, urgent but not important and neither urgent nor important.  The objective is, of course, to work on the ‘urgent and important’ tasks first.

On the other hand, the To Do List is probably the most basic way of prioritising tasks. This is done by simply listing tasks in order of importance with 1 being the most important. If your team prefers the paperless approach, tools such as Todoist are simple and effective.

Tip 3. Equip your team with the right tools.

Imagine attempting to cook when there are no pots and pans or trying to build a shed with no screws. Without the right tools and resources to carry out these tasks, accomplishing the work involved is difficult or near impossible. The same principle applies to any professional tasks. If not equipped with the right tools and knowledge, the productivity of your staff can suffer. Conversely, when equipped with appropriate support and the right tools, staff are able and well equipped to carry out their work more efficiently. Tools in this context may refer to having a computer with up-to-date programs, communication systems, collaboration tools and other applications relating to your industry. Support as a tool may be as simple as taking the time to run them through how you would do something or how you would like the task done and then being there to help them where appropriate if they’ve never attempted this task before.

Tip 4. Create an environment free of interference.

Help your team ‘get in the zone’ and avoid distraction by creating an atmosphere that is conducive to focus. This, of course, needs to keep in mind the various differences in how your team may react to environmental factors, in order to achieve a happy medium. What one may think is a distraction, another may consider therapeutic.  Given that this may be the case, train your staff to be mindful of their co-workers’ needs. An example of a small change to reduce distraction may surround ensuring staff put their mobile phones on silent so as not to disrupt the whole team each time a message or a call is received.

Tip 5. Motivate team members.

Happiness boosts productivity according to a study conducted by the University of Warwick in the UK. Employee happiness is achieved through motivation and inspiration. There are myriad ways of motivating your staff.  Creating a comfortable working environment, praising your staff and offering feedback, giving small workplace benefits such as free doughnuts on a Friday to get through the final push to the weekend, are all little things that go a long way.

Tip 6. Manage time wisely.

This one is a given. There are only eight working hours in a day and oftentimes this is disproportionate to what needs to get done at work.  Needless to say, these hours must be spent wisely.  As they say “Time waits for no one.”

In managing time, there are two techniques that we recommend. These are the Pomodoro Technique and Time Blocking Method.  The Pomodoro Technique uses a timer to break down work into intermissions, usually 25 minutes in length, separated by short breaks.  Taking frequent breaks supposedly improves alertness. On the other hand, Time Blocking is blocking periods of time for specific tasks as well as blocking off open-ended time periods for proactive tasks allowing the user to make modifications to his schedule depending on how his day unfolds.

Tip 7. Collaborate with each other.

Fostering a culture of collaboration among staff has many benefits.  As another old saying goes (one more) “Two Heads are better than one.”  This is especially true when it comes to innovation and problem-solving. Furthermore, as different people have different skill sets, having mutual support allows the exchange and sharing of these skills to support the needs of other team members. This then fast tracks certain processes and ultimately improves the team’s efficiency. In addition to the skills that can be combined, collaboration in teams can aid in productivity as when a member of a team feels more accountable to others and their expectations of deadlines, this can provide the added incentive to not disappoint a colleague or be seen as a weak link.

The ultimate goal of any For-profit Business is to be successful and for this to show in their books. In getting to that point, the people behind the business and how they spend their time are critical to meeting that goal.  However, some businesses reach that point faster than others. Following the suggestions above will get you and your staff on the path to working smarter not harder and improving the productivity within your team.

The post Team Productivity – Simple Steps to Tick More Off Your List appeared first on Reload Consulting.

This isn’t managing up. This is performance dishonesty.

Managing up, when done well, can have massive benefits for the individual employee, their immediate boss and the business overall.

So firstly, what is “managing up” when it’s done well?

Ultimately it comes down to communication. Everyone has a communication preference. In the workplace, this can boil down to a preference for face-to-face, email or phone communication.

But it also goes beyond just simply the communication medium, to also the types of information presented. Bullet points? PowerPoint? Long, winding emails? Facts and figures? Case studies?

Traditional notions of management have put the onus of working out the most appropriate communication method onto the manager (i.e. managing down). After all, they’re the ones responsible for the success of the project or business. However, the typical manager has on average 14 direct reports. That’s 14 different communication preferences a manager has to juggle.

What managing up does is reverses this. If a direct report is able to understand the communication preference of their immediate manager, and actually tailor their communication to that preference, things get done with increased efficiency. This can also include an understanding of what issues matter most to them in a decision? Is it speed, cost, growth potential, innovation, etc?

For example, if an employee is able to determine that their immediate manager likes things in writing, with costs in bullet points, and typically prefers a few days to “mull things over,” then arranging a face-to-face meeting at short notice and expecting an immediate answer is not only going to fail but likely going to be completely counter-productive.

An employee well versed in managing up is able to deliver the right types of information, using the right method, at the right time. Naturally, that sort of behaviour not only helps their manager make informed decisions more efficiently but also bodes well for the employee come promotion time.

For employees, managing up has obvious advantages, but many seem reluctant to do it. Again, traditional notions are probably to blame here. Research performed by Future Workplace actually suggest Gen Y is better at this than most (you can listen to a summary of this research in a Harvard Business Podcast on managing up here).

This is where managers can actually sit down with their direct reports and discuss the way they’d like to receive information, and openly discuss the way they go about making decisions and how their staff can assist in that process. With everyone on the same page, stuff gets done and everybody wins.

The post Why “Managing Up” is Good for Your Staff and Your Business appeared first on Reload Consulting.