Business Management Improvement Ideas
I often get asked for a checklist of
business management improvement ideas. While the following list isn’t exhaustive, it is a good start for anyone who would like to audit their existing business situation:
- Develop a strategic plan every 5 years and support it with annual operating plans; Plan your work, work your plan.
- Whenever possible, base important decisions on data or specific information, not just opinions or personal experience—facts matter.
- Establish Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that everyone in the organization can understand, and then be actively transparent with the results.
- Identify and regularly communicate your cultural values/expectations.
- Institute financial forecasting as standard operating procedure; be proactive, not reactive, when it comes to profitability, cash flow, and asset/debt management.
- Foster a culture that breeds contingency planning (“What If” scenarios) and manage your resource decisions accordingly.
- Use your operating budget as a “real-time” management tool and flex your variable expense/investment decisions up or down to reflect the current reality.
- Strive to understand the true cost of your products and services on a per-unit basis; not every product or service is a winner, and resources should be allocated carefully.
- Identify and manage to clear and specific performance standards for each department/program and drill this information down to the individual employee level.
- Capture internal best practices wherever possible and use this information to leverage existing talents and capabilities; actively avoid the “recreating the wheel” syndrome.
- Hire for cultural fit as much as competence; fire anyone who degrades the culture.
- Ensure that every employee has a clear and concise job description that accurately reflects the role’s requirements and includes specific success metrics.
- Create staffing plans and hours of operation based on true volume patterns (daily, weekly, and seasonally), not accepted norms; maximize staff and capacity utilization.
- Cross-train staff as widely as possible to expand employee competencies and minimize work redundancies.
- Share staff across programs or departments based on actual resource needs rather than departmental budgeting or turf issues.
- Make quality control an integral part of the product or service delivery process; quality should be perceived as everyone’s responsibility.
- Centralize the purchasing of supplies across all departments/programs; empower a key purchasing point person to manage these expenses.
- Provide rewards (both financial and non-financial) for individuals or teams that exceed performance targets or achieve “personal best” status.
- Collect customer feedback data on a regular basis and use the information to improve product/service delivery and evaluate staff.
- Collect employee feedback data on a semi-regular basis and use this information to guide managerial decision-making and evaluate individual supervisor/manager performance.
- Reward risk-taking wherever possible, as long as it is prudent to do so; push everyone to exceed their own comfort zone of responsibility.
- Build a culture that learns from its mistakes rather than assigning blame, minimizing excuses, and finger-pointing.
- Celebrate successes!
