Does your business pick its nose?
Why bad business habits equals poor performance
Just like people, businesses develop habits, some good and some bad. These habits, the unwritten customs which everyone understands but which are rarely articulated, explain how a business operates. For example, knowing it is ok to be a few minutes late, or to extend lunch by 10 minutes, is a bad habit staff can pick up. Other habits relate to how you transact business.
What habits (good and bad) has your business developed?
A company’s habits and unwritten rules can be summed up in the term 'company culture.' A positive dynamic culture is a firm’s greatest asset as it drives business performance. A negative, change resistant culture will be the company’s downfall. The one thing that is certain is that if a company wants to enhance its performance, the unwritten rules and habits of how it does business, has to be addressed.
Cultural change in an organisation will not happen overnight. Some people argue that it takes a generation for a business to change how it operates, but in today’s rapidly changing business environment allowing the firm’s habits to change and evolve by themselves is a luxury company’s don’t have.
Below are six business habits which collectively will take your business culture and therefore your business performance from where it is now to where you would like it to be.
1. New thoughts, new conversations.
Research has found that as humans we have approximately 80,000 thoughts a day, with 80% of these thoughts being the same every day. It is our thoughts which drive our behaviour, so if you want different behaviour at work, for example, for staff to be more sales or customer focussed, they need to have more sales or customer focussed thoughts. Logical? The best way to instil these new thoughts is having new or different conversations with staff.
2. Walk the Talk
As a manager or business owner, you have to personify the change you want to see. You also have to be persistent and consistent in your new behaviour, so staff will get into the habit of seeing you in a different light. For example, if you want staff to put the customer first, you have to be seen in your daily actions to be putting the customer first.
3. Information Templates
As humans we all have the need to feel valued. One way of satisfying this need in a work context is knowing how your job contributes to the success of the business. Sharing high level information on how the company is performing, e.g. weekly or monthly sales figures will show staff how their daily actions impact on the bottom line. What you want to achieve is a way of encouraging personal responsibility for daily behaviours at work.
4. Disciplined Performance Reviews
Staff will only act in accordance to how they perceive they are being rewarded. Why should staff put more effort into selling or being customer focussed if there is no incentive in it for them? That incentive may involve a bonus at the end of the month or year or perceived pain if they don’t perform (no bonus or being let go) but staff have to clearly see how their daily behaviour contributes to their remuneration.
5. Focussed Meetings
Regularly, preferable weekly meetings are a great way of sharing information with staff and fostering an attitude of openness, accountability and proactivity. In smaller businesses, such a meeting will involve all staff. In bigger companies, it might be managers only, who then in turn will chair a similar meeting with their staff. The agenda can be the same each week, but the very act of having this regular forum is an opportunity to have new conversations with staff.
6. Invest in training
Your business will not move to the next level or to where you want it to go unless you and your staff have the skills and knowledge to take it there. Ask yourself, what are the skill gaps in the company, where do we need more expertise? Should I be hiring in new people with new or complimentary skills or do we need more in-house training? It is all very well instructing and even rewarding staff to be more sales focussed, but results will be limited unless staff receive the necessary training.
Business habits, just like personal habits require conscious and consistent effort before new more productive habits become the norm. To illustrate this point, here is a simple analogy. Changing a work related habit is just like folding your arms the opposite way. Try it. It will feel very awkward and even uncomfortable at first, you will want to go back to the old way of doing it, but to ingrain the new habit, continuous effort is needed. However if you persevere for a few weeks, it will become natural and new conversations and behaviours will become part of everyone’s daily work.
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