Negosentro| Building a Business That Thrives With Change |Building a business comes with risk as well as reward. No entrepreneur can avoid every challenge and pitfall, but with careful planning, your business can thrive with change.
The COVID-19 pandemic has shaken up the way business is done. Many companies are adjusting their policies and procedures to mitigate the world-wide economic effects of the coronavirus. Many more are planning for the future and how to avoid taking similar hits.
Careful entrepreneurs will build their businesses to ride the waves of trouble that will inevitably come their way. By re-engineering processes and putting the time and resources into efficient tech, your business can not only survive change but thrive with it.
Re-Engineer to Survive the Worst
The coronavirus caused businesses to come up with solutions to reduce the damage of the global disaster on the fly. As an entrepreneur formulating your business, you have the benefit of planning ahead of time for how your business idea can fare anything that might come to it.
Successful businesses employ a tactic called business process re-engineering (BPR). With BPR, an organization examines every facet of its procedures to determine where improvements can be made. The result is a more efficient company, with processes that cut costs and improve product or service quality.
Whatever stage your business is in, you can start the re-engineering process, beginning with an in-depth analysis. By determining performance patterns from the start, you can start planning for how to survive any change.
Areas to Focus Business Process Re-Engineering
Thriving in a changing business environment means being prepared to reassess every aspect of your workplace. By focusing on these five areas, you can develop a business that will weather any storm.
- Employee Efficiency
You can create a work environment in which your employees thrive, doing their best work and innovating for solutions despite what’s happening in the world.
Different people work better at different times and places. Design your business plan to be flexible around the needs of employees. Schedule meetings to limit work interruptions. Give employees opportunities to self-analyze productivity. If employees work better at home, early in the morning, late at night, or at the coffee shop, try to make this flexibility possible.
You’ll increase the efficiency of your employees by allowing them to maximize their own strengths, and you’ll have a workplace that is adaptable to unpredicted change.
- Technology
Unnecessary, outdated processes can bog you and your employees down. Take every opportunity to examine where paperwork and other lengthy manual processes can be paired down or automated. This is where technology is exceptionally helpful.
With the right software, you can save immense amounts of time and money. For example, an automated accounts payable (AP) system will save your company in labor and paperwork. When planning your business, take the time to understand where an AP automation project might fail and how to ensure its success.
Take the planning stage of your business to research technology that will maximize the efficiency of your business. To thrive during times of economic change, you can’t keep technology and resources that could help you on the backburner.
- Communication
Arguably little is more vital to a thriving business than communication. Efficient, open lines of feedback from employee to manager or consumer to business give you the tools to adapt when you need to. And the key to communication is listening.
A feedback system in which both employees and management can make themselves heard is necessary for a thriving business. Tools like organized employee events and suggestions and feedback meetings will help. Your business plan should have effective methods for communicating change to employees built-in, so you’re not struggling when you need it most.
- Adaptability
The ability to adapt to change should be built into a business plan from the start. With the proper communication and employee feedback tools, you have almost everything you need to understand where improvements are needed. Key performance indicators (KPIs) give you the rest.
KPIs track metrics of success for your company. With goals set from the beginning, you should know exactly what needs to be tracked — from output to customer satisfaction. Tracking these metrics gives you a clear picture of what is happening with your business, so you can promptly adapt.
Prepare KPI tracking to find exactly where your business needs to adapt, then be ready to communicate that change effectively to employees and customers.
- Innovation
Businesses that can thrive through times of change require innovation. Make innovation a value of your business from the start to keep you and your employees looking for ways in which to maximize efficiency and quality.
Enable a work culture where creativity and ideas can flourish. Plan for brainstorming and suggestion meetings. Once again, listening is key.
A company that innovates is far more likely to find the tools it needs to grow even in the most uncertain environments.
Through re-engineering five key areas of your business process, any entrepreneur can build the stability their business will need to be successful even during times of great change. As the business world moves into a new post-pandemic normal, you can plan for the next big shake-up and how your business will make it through unscathed.
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