Are Your Employees the Problem?
Are you doing regular performance reviews with your staff? I find most business owners do, either quarterly, twice a year, yearly, maybe. And we know it’s an important thing to do because we need to uncover areas of development with our team. And we know that as our team get better, the business gets better, right?
Part B of the question, and this is really going to shine the light on the area that most business owners aren’t looking at in their business, is how often are you doing process reviews of your business? Are you doing regular process reviews? Now you may be asking, well, why would I do that?
Your business is a collection of processes run by people and you’re putting time, effort and energy into developing your people. Why not put as much time, effort and energy into developing your processes?
Think back to the skills and abilities you had as a business owner when you first started. Now think of the skills and abilities you have now. Have you had to grow and become and develop yourself over the years? Of course.
Think of the team members that started off with you. Do you have some that are still with you?
If you do, you’ve probably seen that they’ve had to grow and develop over the years as well. They’ve had to up-skill and get better. Think of some of the staff that weren’t willing to do that. Are they still on the team? They’ve probably left, right? The business outgrows people.
We have to continually evolve ourself to be able to grow our business. And our business as it grows, it outgrows the systems that once were working.
So we’ve got to make sure that we’re regularly reviewing our processes and systems in the business so that we can continue to evolve those to support the business as it is today and where it’s going to be.
I find most business owners only really look at process and system challenges when there’s a real problem.
And after they’ve blamed their staff for the problem, right? It’s certainly not the staff’s fault. Let’s assume your staff show up every day, sincere, hardworking, wanting to do a good job. If that’s the case, and we have a challenge, let’s collaborate with that team member instead.
Let’s break down the system and the process they used to get the result that you’re looking for and find out what went wrong. Find out where the problems are in the process and the system.
And also remember as your business is a collection of systems, they interact. There’s an interdependence between the processes and systems in your business too.
You can have a problem with process A that links to B, C and D. And process F could have a massive bottleneck because of something that’s happening on A.
That’s why it’s important on a regular basis to schedule time with your team to review your processes and find out where things could go better.
So that’s the strategy – instead of blaming your people when there’s a challenge, collaborate with them, analyze the system, see if together you can figure out what needs to change in the system. Train them up and then you can have better consistency and growth in your business.
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