Return on Effort

If you are in business, you know all about Return on Investment (ROI) - perhaps not in 'accounting' terms, but you know that every investment you make, every penny you spend has to pay you back within a defined timescale.

 

Yet, I bet there are things going on inside your company that are dragging you down, slowing that financial return.  I can't tell you what they are (without coming around and observing what goes on) ... but I'm sure they are there all the same.

 

Sometimes we forget that business is essentially simple ... find out what your customers value and do more of it ... find out what they don't value and do less of it.  But all sorts of things tend to get in the way ... especsailly as a business starts to grow ... and we spend more time organising rather than doing - a necessary but sometimes ineffective evil ... if we have not been trianed  - or not trained ourselves - to organise.

 

One simple pproach to addressing this is to think through what you - and your staff - actually DO in a day .. and think about the Return on Effort relating to each activity. Why do we do that? In what way does it -directy or indirectly - provide value to our customers. If you can't answer the question, stop doing it!

Do you know where the time goes?

Do you know how your staff spend their time - which tasks and activities consume most of it? If not, try collecting this data for a week. Get the staff to record for themselves each half hour what they are doing and use this as a guide to how they spend their time. Then ask the questions: "Is this how I want them to spend their time?" "How much of what they do adds value?"


You then have the ammunition you need to start making informed changes.

What did i do today?

What did I do today to add EXTRA value to my business?

 

I am sure that you work hard every day.  if you are an entreptreneur and/or small business owner, that is undoubtedly true. But sometimes, hard work is not enough.  Sometimes we work so hard we forget to think about what it is we are doing ... and more importantly, what we shjould be doing tomorrow.

 

Think about what you have done today ... and how it will change the business going forward. If there is nothing can think of that is significant, ask yourself if this is simply because you have been too busy on operational activity. If it is, you need to find some way of passing these operational chores on to someone else, while you do the really important job of planning ansd shaping the future.  No-one else will do that!

Look like you mean it

Do you have an office visible to your workforce?  If so, it sends out signals about you and your attitude to 'organisation'.  If your office is (continually) cluttered and untidy, you are saying (subconsciously) that you don't care about organisation, effectiveness, discipline and order.

 

Is this what you want to say?

Let them Play

Do you let your employees play?  On the Internet, for example .... or do you lock things down so they have to work, work, work.

 

We want our employees to work - but we want them to work productively. One way of doing this is to create parameters within which play (of some kind) is allowable - perhaps at lunchtime, perhaps on Friday afternoons, perhaps for 5 minutes every hour.

 

What 'play' can do is allow staff to recover and re-energise ... or deal with small domestic issues (like booking a plumber) that might be distracting them from their work.  If you don't give them 'playtime' they'll probably take it anyway - by working more slowly and less effectively.  

 

So, take control of that playtime - build it in safely into daily or weekly routines ... and then you both reap the benefits.

Be like a Boy Scout - Be Prepared

I often talk to students about their future careers - pointing out that almost everyone I know (or indeed have met) simply 'stumbles' through their career - very few can claim to have planned it.  What students are doing by getting educated is to increase the range of opportunites that thay can seize as they 'float by'.

 

This is exactly the same strategy adopted by good businesses.  They develop their infrastructure, their systems, their technologies and their people - so that they too are prepared for a wider range of opprtunities.  Some of these opportunities canot currently be foreseen or even imagined.  But the agile firm is ready when they emerge.

 

So think what you should be doing inside your copnany to make yourself better prepared to seize future opportunities.

Management by Walking About (but take a camera)!

MBWA - Management by Walking About - works.  If a manager walks his or her domain regularly - with eyes and ears truly open - he or she is likely to see and hear things that would otherwise go unnoticed. One way to enhance this process is to walk with a camera and take pictures of 'waste' and 'clutter'.  It is much harder for people to defend themselves when faced with a photo ... and much easier to show improvement if you take 'before' and 'after' photos.  Besides which, when you look through a camera lens - or at a resulting photo -you often see the world differently. You are more likely to see 'the truth'. When you simply walk past, even though you think you are looking, you often see what you expect to see ... or what you always see.

 

Depending on the relationship you have with staff, you can even open drawers and cupboards and take pictures.  You can then either insist people tidy up ... or ask them what they need in order to be more tidy - better filing systems, desk tidys, etc.

 

The aim is to make things accessible when needed - quickly and efficiently.