How to Experience Business Growth through Employee Satisfaction
If you want to experience business growth, you will need to foster employee satisfaction. Happy employees equal loyal laborers. When your employees are happy, your customers are more likely to be happy, and you will be happy with your business.
So, how do you make an employee happy, especially if you are just starting out? Unless you have a wealthy uncle, you are not yet in a position to offer much in the way of employee incentives. Fortunately, fostering worker loyalty does not have to cost money.
First, treat your employee with kindness and respect. You can still maintain your position as the boss, and still exercise common courtesy. Let your employees know your rules and expectations, and subsequent actions for noncompliance, from the beginning of their employment, and avoid disciplinary problems. However, do not be a tyrant. Allow your employees to grow as well. Listen to their ideas and give them room to try something new. Yes, you can experience business growth with happy employees, and it will not reduce your bottom line in the least.
Second, treat your customers with kindness and respect. Whether they enter your establishment with smiles on their faces, or have a black cloud of doom overhead, it is equally important that you keep your eye on the big picture. Your customers are actually the best advertisement for your business.
Unfortunately, if you have disgruntled employees, you will likely lose some potentially long-term customers. Even with the best efforts to be positive and cheerful, a customer can tell if employee relations are suffering, and will be less eager to pay a return visit. Similarly, when a really cantankerous customer walks in the door, it will be almost impossible to maintain excellent customer service, if an employee already feels devalued by you-the boss.
Third, you will be much happier, if your employees are happy and building a community of loyal consumers. The bottom line: you need to worry about the people associated with you business, customer and employee. If you truly want to experience noteworthy business growth, forget obsessing over the bottom line.
As a result, you will be less likely to compromise productivity while training new employees on a regular basis; you will spend less time worrying about advertising the business, if you employees have helped you establish a loyal customer base. Likewise, do not forget about your faithful employees, and they will stick with you during the trying times and the periods of prosperity. In the end, you will experience substantial business growth by practicing two simple words with your employees: common courtesy.
Paul Sutherland is an Accelerated Business Growth Coach. His company – Daniel Thomas International – http://www.dti.eu.com helps SMEs to grow their businesses with tried tested and proven techniques and strategies, increasing their bottom line profits in 90 days or less.
Escape Planning – Using Fire Exits To Get Out Safely
Fire exits should be strategically located, with an outward opening door that has a crash bar and outward leading signs on it. Knowing where to find the emergency exits in a building that you frequent can save your life. Inward opening, rotating and sliding doors are unacceptable for use as fire exits, as they might need to be fixed open using a latch or chain if the door is needed as an exit route.
In the UK, one exit is satisfactory for buildings where no more than 60 people work, as long as that the building is on the ground floor level only. The outsides of fire exits need to be kept clear and marked with a suitable keep clear sign. Whenever the building is in use, the exits should be well lit by normal mains lighting. Once your workplace follows a course of scheduled assessment, unsafe conditions can be recognized and corrected before they cause serious injuries.
Learn the location of fire escape routes and how to set off the fire alarm. It might be necessary to make available “refuge points” for disabled or elderly persons to wait for assistance in some larger buildings. You should also remember staircase exits, since elevators may not function during a fire, or may expose passengers to gas, heat or smoke.
It is important that there be sufficient and adequate fire exits so that people can safely and swiftly leave the building without being put in any danger should there be an outbreak of fire. The combined use of ordinary and special fire exits allows for quicker mass departure, while it also gives another option if the route to the usual exit is blocked by fire, etc.
The number of people who could potentially use the exit, together with several other factors, will decide the amount of fire exits used in any situation. Fire exits should be spread around the building so ensuring that people can reach a safe exit route. Fire exit routes must be kept clear at all times. Fire protection measures can include the installation of fire doors, a common sight in larger buildings.
Having a sound escape plan will greatly reduce fire deaths and protect you and your employees’ safety if fire occurs. Remember, in the event of a fire, time is the biggest enemy and every second counts! Practice escape plans at least twice per year. Designate a meeting location at least 500 feet away from the building, but not necessarily across the street. Remember to escape first, and then notify the fire service.
Small Fire Procedures
If a minor fire appears controllable, do the following:
1. Avoid personal injury and extreme risks
2. Warn people in the immediate area and set off the alarm
3. Call the fire brigade
4. Smother fire or use the nearest fire extinguisher
5. Always maintain a way to leave the room
Immediately notify the fire brigade if the fire seems unmanageable, and then vacate all rooms, closing all doors to confine the fire and reduce oxygen. Follow your evacuation plan and walk quickly to the nearest marked exit and ask others to do the same. Assist the handicapped in leaving the building. If requested, help the emergency crews as necessary. Do not return to an evacuated building until the emergency crew pronounces that it is safe to do so.
Each workplace building should have at least two separate means of escape. The local fire brigade should from time to time make a plant walk-through to check on fire safety, and to ensure that fire exits are located far enough from each other that a fire in one area won’t block both or all exits. Fire exits must never be locked or blocked when people are working in the building.
http://www.FireProtectionOnline.co.uk sells a full range of fire extinguishers and fire safety equipment for business and homes and gives expert fire safety advice
Effective Working Practices In Your Office Space
One of the best ways to be more effective in your work is to take control back, wherever possible. By working on your own area where you work, you can ensure that you feel better and much more in control. This can easily lead to a more confident and capable performance.
1) Closing the Door
Closing your door, if you have one, is a great effective working practice.
By ensuring that anyone who sees your door closed knows that you are in ‘do not disturb’ mode, there are no misunderstandings, except perhaps, the first couple of times you need to tell someone. And make it only a couple of times – no more.
You see that your people need to be trained and when you are changing your behaviors, there will always be a few teething troubles, so you have to be gentle and firm at the same time.
In fact this a very productive exercise in itself, because as you display new and much more effective working practices yourself, your people start to notice and, hey presto, start mimicking your change style. You don’t even need to make the point sometimes. It’s like magic!
2) Remove Distractions
It’s very easy to get clutter piled up on your desk or other places you might describe as your work area. Sometimes it’s worth taking the step to have a clearout before you start work.
By moving these ‘visual distractions’ out of sight, you will find it much easier to focus on a special task. It’s not a magic way of making things ‘disappear’. No, you still have to evolve a system to manage the pile of stuff you’ve hidden.
But you can declutter your brain for a short while to get something done and then get back to that pile at a different (better) time for you.
This activity (hiding stuff for a bit!), is a very freeing thing to do – give it a try – you will feel wonderful, for a while!
3) Position Your Computer
In reviewing visual distractions, it’s easy to have your computer monitor lined up in such a way as to interfere with your concentration, with other’s movements maybe catching your eye.
If that’s the case, position it such that there are less likely to be any interactions that cross into your viewing space. This will significantly add to your effective working practices.
Remember, you are not in control of a lot of things when you work for an organization – it’s just the way it is, working as an employee at whatever level you are at.
Making sure that you attend to what you do have control of, is a step to maintaining your own dignity, self-respect and control, as well as a very effective working practice in itself.
(c) 2007 “How To Land Your Dream Job”. You can have the job of your dreams. It takes application, attention and the information you need to get you there, young or old. There’s all you need at Martin Haworth’s website, at http://www.HowToLandYourDreamJob.com
Can IOVC and Office Process Improvement Really Save You Money?
Are you just starting out in business? Are you wondering what IOVC and the “O” of IOVC technology means? You heard about office process improvement, business process improvement, business process management, workflow management and you wonder what these IOVC technologies can do for improving your business operation?
IOVC technologies can cut your business costs sharply. Business process improvements that address your office processes have demonstrated many business benefits for a long time now. This set of IOVC technologies has been primarily associated with large corporate business but no more. Small and medium business can benefit from an office process improvement or BPI/BPM tool. If you need to ring more profit from an existing business operation then you owe it to yourself to make yourself profitable with the many readily available business process improvement technologies.
In this series examining the “O” of IOVC (internet, office, voip and crm) technologies, the office improvement or business process improvement movement has many tools and products available to help the business owner improve their business operation. To sort out the complexity of business process improvement, business process management, technology and application support we need to answer a few key questions such as:
What is your BPI, BPM process?
What is your potential problem?
What do you need to learn about your business?
What is the business process improvement process?
What is the best way to train you and your team?
What benefits can you expect?
What are the next steps?
What is your BPI, BPM process? Those new to business process improvement and business process management need to understand just what is a business processes. The office or business process is really your normal office workflow that you and your team use daily. Within that workflow are people, process, products and projects. Supporting and or enabling these components are your software applications and supporting technologies that allow you to perform the business functions.
What is your potential problem? The complexity that occurs after your business has been operating for a while means your business processes by their nature become complex, disjointed and out of sync. The ability to manage your processes and keep your processes operating at peak efficiency is what’s needed to keep your business healthy. Viewed from a top down perspective, it is your end-to-end business process or business workflow that drives your business.
What do you need to learn about your business? With that understanding your team needs to define your business process and unearth the perceived business problem. Yes you have to make the problem real on paper. The team needs to define what tools are used when identifying your business processes.
What is the Business Process Improvement process? The team would document the existing business process by developing beginning to end process maps. They would identify which steps in your process add value. Then the team would identify the steps that cause pain and detract from the efficiency of the process. Then the team works to eliminate those business steps that fail to add value. Once all is documented, the team transitions from identifying and knowing what steps to improve, the team would collectively be able to understand and discuss what to do when the identified solution conflicts with business policy or a current external process and still make it functional within your organization.
Enter Business Process Management phrase – Then the business improvement solution is implemented and becomes operational. To ensure continued success, the group proceeds to manage the business process using a selected business process management tool. This requires the complete understanding of current routines, future goals and the gaps in between. Once the process is operational, the process becomes a business process management procedure.
What is the best way to train you and your team? Since your personnel work daily to complete specific business processes using technology that you have within in your business, they should become intimately involved with learning about managing your business processes especially since they are a part of them everyday. For BPI assessments to be effective, the best way to learn is in a situational manner which enables you to identify and manage your specific business processes. You may even consider having customized courses that can be defined to target your specific situation.
What are the expected benefits? The benefits of a business process improvement and management assessment is that your business will be able to continuously strive for a more effective business process and therefore you will gain improved efficiency. The resulting office process improvements enable many other products and services to operate more efficiently. Working with a team and understanding the issues associated with your end to end business operation can help you define the gaps in your business and remove the daily problems and disconnects with your vendors. This can come from keeping your business processes in sync with the proper support of your technology and your people. The gains can sometimes approach a 50 percent or more gain in efficiency.
In today’s business environment, we continuously strive for a more effective business process operation and a firm with actual hands on experience can help you learn and apply these strategies. That is because business process improvement and business process management have become essential tools to just about any organization.
In summary, with proper people, education and learning in a situational environment, one can first identify the process, then analyze the process and move on to improving and monitoring the process. The complexity and payback of business process improvements are many because one improvement can lead to many more and sometimes it’s a simple fix and other times a lot more complex. The details require more explanation then we can provide here, however you owe it to yourself to investigate this area of IOVC technologies further and profit from these capabilities.
Gregory L Burrus, http://www.techoss.com , a former Director of a Fortune 500 Telecommunications company, consults for major telecom and operational support system vendors. Greg provides small business solutions as an internet, office, voice over internet protocol technology solutions.