“It is so easy to overestimate the importance of one defining moment and underestimate the value of making small improvements on a daily basis.” — James Clear, Atomic Habits
Did you know that if you only make a 1 percent improvement or setback each day for one year, you’ll be 37 times better or worse than when you started the process? Habits work like compound interest. Now multiply that compound interest, positive or negative, by your number of employees. That’s a lot of potential impacts. Long story short, to have a better business, you need to teach your team to set better habits.
Here are some tips on building and maintaining good habits:
Here at CLS, we can connect you to experts who can help elevate your business game.
As a leader, you can create a work culture that promotes employee commitment and engagement. Committed employees are happy employees, and happy employees lead to high-quality performance.
Here are four ways you can increase your employees’ commitment, without giving them bonuses, free trips, or a puppy.
If you need help creating and updating content for training, processes, professional development, or marketing, CLS is here to help!
It’s the beginning of the new year, and you’ve gone through the arduous process of creating your 2023 budget. Don’t let all that work and maybe even some hair-pulling go to waste! Budgets aren’t just something to do for fun; they are intended to increase revenue and cut spending costs. Projecting your budget allows you to forecast growth for the new year to improve the business strategy. This is the time to make tactical changes that will benefit your company long-term.
The first thing you need to know is that there is a difference between a budget projection and a budget forecast. The most significant difference between these two terms is the component of time. A budget projection is intended to be a long-term goal of one or more years, and a budget forecast is a short-term goal of usually less than a year or between the range of one to four quarters. A budget projection is the what, and the budget forecast is the how to achieve the goal set out in the budget projection.
A budget projection is an umbrella goal, and within that umbrella are budget forecasts that make those larger, overarching goals more attainable for you and your employees. Budget forecasts are goals that keep individual departments accountable for their component of the goal because each department plays an individual role in achieving the greater, intended goal. Budget forecasting aids in building revenue, reducing expenses, and allowing departments within your organization to develop an internal commitment to your company’s goals and values to achieve long-term success.
Budget projections help support financial decision-making to ensure you know where to invest your time and money. It is also a method to plan and prepare for future expenses so that you are not surprised or devastated when you get hit by a recession or other economic downturn. Budget projections help you prepare and plan for expenses to increase revenue based on the supply and demand patterns of the market to cater those analytics to your company’s product or service.
For example, wouldn’t it be nice to know if a key component in your product is going to have a shortage in Q3? Then you could stock up in Q2 and continue on with business as usual. These are the kinds of trends projections look like.
Creating a master budget and an overhead budget can help you plan for possible economic down-turn and scenarios that may negatively affect your business. Creating a master budget and an overhead budget also establishes that your company is growing and making money to be sustainable in the market.
What is the difference between a master budget and an overhead budget? The most significant difference between these two budgets is that one can change, and one is intended to stay the same despite changes in the economy.
An overhead budget is much like a budget projection, presenting the expected expenses of the year, but it may change depending on the market or your company’s success. A master budget is a budget or document that your employees can refer to when making financial decisions about expenses based on revenue; this budget does not change. The master budget acts much like a key to your employees’ financial decision-making to increase accuracy and keep your expenses down and revenue up.
You are 42% more likely to achieve a goal when you write it down than if you do not. So, use budget projections to your advantage, don’t just check a box off a list. Optimize your projections to see the growth and expansion of your business within your market. Make budget projections and budget forecasts to ensure that you are making visible progress toward the goals you set and intend to achieve. Your goals no longer need to be wishful thinking. Not sure where to start? Or behind on your budgets? C-level Strategy can help. We have the expertise to take you from where you are and to where you want to be.
Sources:
https://www.inc.com/peter-economy/
All businesses should be aware of the potential frauds that can impact them negatively. One of the most common frauds is employee fraud or theft. Embroker has a list of alarming statistics regarding employee theft.
Understanding the factors that drive employees to steal can help business owners identify potential theft opportunities before it becomes a real issue. Three common factors that cause employee theft are:
Knowing and paying attention to your employees can help prevent employee theft. Some of the best practices to accomplish this are:
A good leader is someone who inspires positive, ongoing change by empowering their employees to work toward common objectives. Communication is the most powerful and effective means of doing so; this is how you align goals, build mutual trust, and overcome barriers to progress.
According to the Economist Intelligence Unit, poor communication is most often caused by differences in communication styles. 86% of employees and executives cite the lack of communication as the main cause of workplace failure and 28% of employees cite poor communication as the reason for missing deadlines. If you clearly identify your style of leadership and communication, you’ll get an idea of how you’re perceived across the organization as well as what changes need to be made in order to tailor your communication style to the needs of employees. Maybe you’re a highly authoritative leader with a clear vision, but the company requires more autonomy in order to make sure everything can operate smoothly. Maybe the exact opposite is required – too much leeway is given and as a result, goals, and motivations are disparate and clash with each other.
Equally important is the emotional intelligence of the communicator – can they communicate frankly and effectively while remaining transparent, empathetic, and accepting of feedback?
A top attribute sought by hiring managers, leadership is an essential skill in driving career advancement. Considering how high it correlates with organizational success, this shouldn’t surprise anyone – companies committed to developing employees to have high leadership potential are four times more likely to outperform those that don’t. As such, it’s important to take charge by establishing a clear personal leadership style – this will motivate your employees and help inform how this business handles demanding situations.
A leadership style can be broadly defined as the patterns of behavior consistent across how you as a leader make decisions. To get an idea, think of how colleagues might describe your working relationship – how would you come off during an elevator pitch?
An online course on Leadership Principles from Harvard Business School lays out three frameworks through which your leadership style can be examined:
You can hone your style using these three frameworks and become more effective in your role. You can help to identify your leadership style by building self-awareness through honest reflection and assessment, from colleagues and yourself. You want to be open to feedback to identify areas for improvement and personal growth, and really nail down your most vital functions as a leader.
Here are the three primary styles of leadership:
A growing business is very susceptible to falling victim to the unintentional gumming up of regular operations through the lack of proper scaling, an accumulation of repetition and wasted working hours, or simple bureaucratic bloat. Here are a few ways to automate and streamline your business to keep things running as smooth as possible:
UX (short for user experience) is any way that a customer interfaces with a company during any part of the sales process. This term is mostly commonly applied to a company’s website or apps.
Good UX design is, generally, not overly noticeable. If you are doing it right, your customers should never have to think about how they interact with your company because its intuitive. Bad UX design is the opposite. It is anything that makes it harder to interact with you, your company, or your products.
The most common UX trap is a failure to identify your target audience. An ecommerce company that targets millennials will have different UX goals than if they were to target baby boomers. This is because the baby boomer generation has different UX requirements than the millennial generation. What feels intuitive to one group is difficult or isolating to the other and vice versa. Millennials may get frustrated with a UX design that relies heavily on phone conversations or feels to “dumbed down.”
Your product or service can only be considered successful if it is well-received by your customers. If you aren’t sure exactly who you’re selling to, you can’t know if you hit the mark when it comes to you UX.
Here are some (in)famous examples of Bad UX Design.
Apple Magic Mouse
Upon release, the Apple Magic Mouse was roundly criticized by consumers for one egregious design error: the charging port is located on the underside of the device, meaning that you cannot use it and charge it at the same time. Instead, you have to flip the device over, plug it in, and walk away until it’s ready. This is a violation of one of the most important principles of UX Design — giving control to the user. Amazingly, as of 2022, the Magic Mouse comes in a variety of colors but still charges from the bottom.
ATM Machines
This is calling out a specific feature rather than an entire device, but it’s an issue that’s common to many different kinds of ATMs, and results in a problem many of us have faced at one time or another.
Upon inserting a debit/credit card to make a cash withdrawal at an ATM, many ATMs are programmed to give out the money before returning the user’s debit/credit card. This enables users to forget their card which leads to user frustration when they discover it missing, and time and effort for the bank, when they have to cancel and replace the card.
Online Purchases
Online shopping is more popular than ever, and yet many seemingly obvious UX elements haven’t yet been figured out. A common mistake online storefronts make are long dropdown lists — for example, when stating your country of origin. If a company knows that most of their buyers come from the US, the intuitive thing to do would be to make that the first option in any dropdown list. Instead, most lists are alphabetical requiring tedious scrolling.
Companies often fall into the trap of thinking “it works = good enough” but true success comes to those who optimize. Reach out to CLS to talk about your UX design and ensure you haven’t lost business to frustrated customers.
About a year ago, I took over a position overseeing roughly twenty people spread out over three teams. Their organization and execution was inefficient and needed some help, so I made some changes. Big changes.
When you step into a new management position—whether you’re a CEO at a new company, the next team lead for a scrum, or any such position of company leadership—it’s likely that you’ll see some things you’d like to change: processes that seem inefficient, blind spots in those who have been too close to the SOP’s for too long, or something else entirely. You may even think something big needs a complete overhaul.
How much change should you really try to initiate? How do you do it? Here are the three key things I learned from trying to change the systems that existed before.
Many of the changes I tried to put into place were big, drastic, and disruptive. I thought people would be refreshed by these cool new ideas and excited for the great new way of doing things.
But people were used to what they had. They had grown accustomed to and comfortable with the way things were run; they knew what to expect. Suddenly, this new guy (me) changes everything and they don’t know what to expect at all, which is stressful. This point comes first because it paves the way for the next two.
Instead of coming in the first week, guns a-blazing, new plan already starting to be rolled out, I should have talked to the people I was overseeing to see what they would say worked well and what didn’t. Not only could my changes have been adjusted to meet the needs that already existed, but people would feel like those changes were actually beneficial because they had been heard.
The easiest way to wake up is with the gradual increase of light as the sun rises. This is because the easiest changes to make are the slow, gradual ones. Change happens slowly—in people, in business, in all kinds of things.
Instead of changing everything all at once, like I did, focus on one thing at a time. Improve a single process or step and make sure people are comfortable with it before putting more on their plate. Depending on your relationship with the people you work with, you might even introduce changes in twos or threes if things must move quickly.
But if the systems in place don’t need to be changed urgently, don’t make things urgent. If you can take your time, you’ll create less stress for yourself and everybody else.
Nobody wants to go along with somebody they don’t like, so if you have hopes of improving things in your new position, one of the most important things you can do is get (and stay) on people’s good side.
If you are a new CEO or trying to make big changes in your company and need support, we are here to help. Reach out to CLS.
When communication doesn’t work, nothing works. And wherever there are people, communication can get complicated. What causes these problems? What is poor communication going to do to your business? How do you fix these problems?
An article from ConnecTeam.com gives the top ten reasons why poor communication happens:
The potential fallout from a lack of communication is theoretically endless, but some short articles from Simpplr and Field Service Direct give us a handful of the most common side effects.
Notice how each item in the list above can cause the next. Decreased productivity is an obvious result, but where can that lead? Communication can make or break much more in a company than one might think.
There are hundreds of potential ways to start improving workplace communication, but here are a few that apply directly to the causes and consequences listed above, with help from Indeed and FSD. Of course, this list isn’t comprehensive and there are nearly endless possible outcomes, but here are some great places to start.
Hopefully, this gets you thinking about how to improve communication in your own company. If it all feels too big, reach out to CLS and we’ll help you make a plan and get started.