According to the 2016 Deloitte survey into Global Human Capital Trends, 94% of Australian respondents rated business culture as an important area of competitive advantage. There are multiple ways to create and influence culture, such as socialisation of new staff, storytelling and identifying with shared values. One of the most effective ways we have found…
As companies grow they inevitably become more complex. If complexity is not well managed, problems occur and profits decline. Studies indicate that 15 to 30% of all operating costs in large businesses are due to unnecessary complexity (1). The causes of complexity are varied. Examples include: growth in products and services, taking on new customers, higher standards imposed by customers and so on. Whatever the…
Obtaining ISO certification is usually seen as an annoyance to an otherwise well-functioning business; something that is added to the business to satisfy large customers and governments. Under these circumstances, business owners tolerate the generation of documentation, procedures, registers and even employ extra staff to administer the ‘system’. In many cases, the additional work does…
Information Technology is changing fast, and we need to think differently when applying it to the operations of a business. In the past, business owners would select an IT system to support a set of tasks within the business – CRM, HR, Production orders, Quality – you name it, someone had the software. The problem with this approach…
We are often asked, “how do I know when I have the right number of staff?” Most have too little, some have too many. Staff payments are usually considered an operating expense of the business. As such, we tend to equate less staff with greater profit. In fact, staff payments represent both an operating and investment expense. When staff…
Operational problems remain unresolved when we think about the business as a structure before thinking of it as a set of processes. Elements of business structure include – the people, the organisation chart, physical locations, equipment, branches, stores etc. The structure of the business helps us understand the resources that make up the business, but it provides little…
In many companies, decisions are made ‘top-down’. Owners and managers think through improvements, make decisions and rally their teams to implement them. Although this approach is valid, it has a number of downsides. Most businesses suffer from information asymmetry. This occurs when people at the top have less information than those closest to the work….
Unlike big businesses, most privately-owned medium-sized businesses cannot afford full-time experts in HR and Safety. Despite this, they still have the same obligations. The solution is to embed expert knowledge into existing business processes. This sounds simple, but there are a number of tricks to getting it right. These are: 1) Get the right advice Consult with experts in HR and Safety that are happy to…
In the course of our day, problems inevitably turn up – such as quality failures, safety hazards, customer complaints, environmental impacts and so on. If we don’t get on top of these issues then pretty soon we are ‘fire-fighting’ – fires start just as quickly as we put them out. To move beyond fire-fighting, businesses need a clear process for dealing…
