Lean & Profitable

Harvard Business Publication Suggests:
1. Know your employees’ priorities. Don’t wait for review time. Regularly ask your employees what they care most about. As a manager, you need to know what drives them.
2. Communicate company priorities. Tell employees what the company needs to achieve in the next week, month, and year. Be clear and consistent, and do this often.
3. Align interests to responsibilities. Now that both agendas are clear, try as much as possible to channel employees’ interests into relevant company priorities.

To be a successful business owner, manager, or employee you must reach high, think big, work hard. What are you doing in your business to meet your objectives. Are you allowing your employees to grow, while helping your business to grow? Do not forget to tell your employees if they are doing a good job that by doing this item can give incentives to employees to go the extra mile.

Business is competitive, and no one can win a race by following the leader.  You win by figuring out the most effective way to apply the principles for success to the unique situation in which you operate. Sometimes there is one good move for everyone in the same industry but you can’t all do the same thing in every aspect of the business all the time and have any hope of getting ahead. Where do you stand out in business?
Can you run a business like this?

There is no organization chart
There are no job titles or job descriptions
No bonuses and no perks
No regularly scheduled meetings
No approval levels for capital or expense spending
No goals
No offices or high-walled cubicles
If the peers accept the idea, then “management” is presumed to accept it - hence the need for very little management
If you know what is needed in business and hire the best professionals, can you have a successful business without all of the normal confining constraints found in the typical business world?

Focus your employees on their strengths. Encourage them to do what they are best at. Most importantly, accept they have weaknesses. If one person isn’t good at a specific task, ask someone else to do that task instead. If you can’t take away that part of their job, help them improve enough so it doesn’t hinder their strengths. Depending on the task or skill that is needed it is possible to cross train or have the employee take a class or course to save time from taking another employee away from their duties. Wasted time is wasted money.

In a recent study the results are as following:

Work effort was decreased by 48% (less work, less money)

More time off work was taken by employees by 47% using sick leave or vacation time

Quality of work decreased by 38%

Performance at work declined by by 66% (slower and poor performance causes a loss of income)

If a specific bad incident occurs with another employee or supervisor the worry and stress by the incident led to 80% time off work by the employee who felt stress

If an employee or supervisor was only at the location at certain days or times the employee who felt stressed out will cost the employer by avoiding the agressor by 63%, therefore not fully functioning at work.

The biggest cost to an employer working in a poor or stressful atmosphere is 78% of the stressed employees will not longer be committed to the employer or business.