What’s the greatest constraint to growing your business; winning new business or recruiting and keeping great people? More and more, it is becoming the latter. In 2009 I wrote “soon there will be a dearth of talent so significant, that bad work environments and unhealthy cultures will become much rarer. This will be due to the greatest onslaught of people ever to hit our economy, Baby Boomers, leaving the workforce.
Ask: What are the limiting beliefs we have as an organization? Then ask: What are the empowering beliefs that we have as an Organization? What is the impact of those beliefs? As compared to other similar businesses, how engaged and happy are your people at the workplace? If you can’t measure it, it will be hard to know when you have improved. Whether you have outsiders familiar with many other workplaces give you feedback on how well you’re doing, or you conduct thorough and honest exit interviews with former employees, you’ve got to take your pulse and know the condition of your heart.
Most companies don’t have clear objectives in regard to their culture. These are companies who have never had a competent strategist assess the thoroughness of their objectives. These objectives will be measurable, timed and challenging, and they will relate to changing the beliefs that will thus change the behaviors of you and your people.
These are practices so memorable, meaningful or maniacal that they make permanent impressions, ideally both inside and outside of your company. At Quicken loans, the founder, Dan Gilbert insists that every employee return every customer call and email the same day. Even if the call or missive comes in minutes before you leave the office, you are expected to return it before you leave. Dan would give his direct line out at orientations and tell new hires, “if you’re too busy to return a call, call me, and I’ll do it!”
You are in a battle for the best people in the marketplace. To get them, you need to be the best workplace. To be a great place to work, you need a compelling culture.
Each Tuesday, turnaround consultant Mark Faust will be sharing his expertise on how to turn around your small business. His blogs will be filled with practical insights and basic turnaround strategies designed to guide you through crisis leadership and change management. You'll be able to tap into tips on everything from profitability issues, business continuity plans and pandemic pivots to operational processes, marketing and customers additional value.
As one of the companies he helped grow, we know first hand how inspiring his leadership is and just how well it works! Mark has also agreed to make his best-selling book ‘Growth or Bust’ available, free of charge, to any small business to help them create their own effective turnaround plan. We’ll be sharing that with you soon.
You can learn more about Mark and his company, Echelon Management, by clicking here.
We've been helping InspireHUB clients not just survive during this time but THRIVE! We collected all of our advice and made it available for FREE as our great big give-back during this difficult time. Included in this FREE Guide:
At InspireHUB, we get it. We've been a 100% remote workplace for more than 7 years, and are the first to admit we were UN-InspireHUB while we learned to grow into it.
Here's how you can use it to grow YOUR small business too ...
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