At ScorpInc, we believe competition helps the market grow and to this end we think it’s only fair if we let others in on some of our top tips to a profitable corporation.
Companies are large teams, families in officewear. We work best when we work together, so consider creating work committees to oversee all major changes to products, services, campaigns, and even internal decisions. Make sure you have representatives from different areas of the business; even if it’s not their specialty they are still a key stakeholder as an employee and teammate. Don’t favour any of your reports; like your children you need to treat them equally. Rewarding someone constantly for their good work will hurt the morale of those who might need a bit more assistance. Performance-based bonuses breed discontent and animosity; instead give the high-performing employees the opportunity to help out with the taskloads of others once they’ve finished.
It may seem paradoxical, but agility and innovation are driven by cautiousness and constant deliberation. Reckless decisions quickly backfire, costing time and money that could be better used adding new features and getting ahead in the market. Always review notes from previous meetings and discussions, re-open old topics to discuss any new points of interest. Have regular round table discussions that look at up-to-the-minute changes in the market and how that could affect not just upcoming deadlines but existing products and services. New ideas should be tempered before the aforementioned committees to prevent issues later on.
Strong communication helps ensure the right work happens the first time, which makes makes accurate wording paramount. Memos, marketing, reports, and documentation need to leave no potential for the recipient to get the wrong idea. A great example here is legal documents and contracts; lawyers work hard to make sure there is only one right way to read their work and by following their example you can write a communique once and not have to worry about errors in its transmission.
To help cohesion across all staff and all offices, make sure all employees are kept abreast of what is happening in each location and can stay in contact, no matter where they’re situated. Daily email newsletters about the happenings in each centre can boost morale and informing staff across the organisation about service/facility outages in all locations helps keep them in the loop. Teleconferences are a vital technological marvel that should be latched onto. Geographically displaced teams and departments should be brought together with video hookups regularly and such telepresence allows for all-staff public announcements and discussion forums to be dealt with on one occasion and involve everyone.
Instant messaging clients can assist in rapid communication to reduce unnecessary email flow but restrictions must be in place to prevent misuse; group chats should be encouraged but employees should only be allowed to use the software to keep in contact their team, committee managers, and direct reports. Anything beyond this would usually involve work that should be lodged as a task as part of an audit trail.
This is a vital part of making sure your business is not just meeting all regulatory requirements, but is working as efficiently as possible and providing a swathe of metrics you can use to fine tune process and procedure. All work should be logged through specialised task tracking systems for each major section or business unit to help streamline their workflow. Tasks can be automatically assigned to employees as they finish their current workload, enabling it to be picked up by someone as soon as possible rather than languishing in the inbox of someone on leave. Employees lodging interdepartmental tasks must include a reference to their own task in the new one they’re lodging and vice versa; this helps create threads of workflows which can be used to improve methods and process later on.
It’s also strongly recommended to manually audit a percentage of all tasks to ensure employee compliance, but that’s up to you to find a good balance, we can’t give away all our secrets!