At some point in time all business owners need to ask themselves the hard hitting question, are my staff working effectively for my business?

Often candidates who are attracted to opportunities in start-ups and small businesses are successfully employed as the savvy go-getters the business needs. These prime candidates are tempted into the role by the opportunity to develop a dream role for themselves, quicker progression and even a fancier title for their CV.

These bright young stars quickly win their stripes by providing the kind of service and workload relief a new business owner requires. It doesn’t take long in this environment for them to become indispensable, and it doesn’t take long before these motivated employees have reached workload capacity doing X,Y & Z.
The fact is most often, they are too busy with a workload they’ve had the freedom to design for themselves, and too often these tasks are not necessarily of core importance to the business or the business owner.

I’ve both worked and consulted in organisations where the key figureheads are still slaving over admin, and completing the tasks that no one else wants to do, and when the attempts are made to change this dynamic – the inevitable push back of ‘I’m too busy’ or ‘that’s not my job’ follows.

In many cases these employees have been hired for their expertise in areas where the business owner’s knowledge is lacking – and this can create a difficult balancing act for both the business owner and the employee, both of whom can fall victim to this lack of understanding around what tasks are most relevant to the business and corresponding workloads

Often ‘I’m too busy’ sees a continuation of circumstance, the business owner stuck in admin groundhog day, or perhaps in despair they will create a new role and employ a new staff member to assist with the workload. With this role being created out of the tasks no one wants to do, finding the right candidate may be difficult and retaining them may be even harder. Staff may also see this as an opportunity to offload more of those pesky tasks from their remit, and all of a sudden, the ‘newby’ in your organisation is at capacity, and somewhat uninspired by their role. Meanwhile their colleagues can now focus on more of those items they prefer and YES those tasks may once again not be critical to the success of your business.

The reality is that through clear business objectives, key accountabilities, tangible targets and streamlined systems and processes, most organisations could reduce their labour costs whilst improving sales and productivity.  Most business owners don’t have time to stop and reflect on their organisation and its subsequent development since inception to determine whether what worked a few years ago, is still the best operational model for today.

The Chrome Group help business owners come up for air. Our approach enables us to assist time poor business owners with fresh insight into their business operations, helping them in a variety of ways to boost their business effectively with a focus on ensuring their labour budget is providing them with the best return on investment.  This could be as simple as improving systems and processes to improve task management and delivery to reviewing staff accountabilities and performance objectives to ensure staff are aware of what is business-critical, and the business owners expectations.
Our services have been designed for small to medium businesses to help deliver real results. Please give us a call to see how we might be able to help.