Introducing remote working?

70% of professionals work remotely at least once a week, according to a study by serviced office provider IWG. Remote working has become more and more common as developments in technology have allowed us to communicate and collaborate no matter where we are. In fact, most of us are already logging on from home or holiday.

Remote work is on the rise, and it’s challenging traditional ideas about where and when work should take place. Offering flexibility to your staff can be a valuable tool to both attract new talent and retain your existing team. Make sure you’ve set up the systems to support this way of working.

Remote work has many benefits for a business. Introducing remote working can mean that you retain employees through a change in their circumstances, for example, becoming a parent or relocating to a different part of the country. When you’re recruiting, the ability to offer an entirely remote position can mean that you’re suddenly able to consider candidates from across the country, rather than limiting yourself to one area, or to people who are in the position to be able to relocate.

So what do you consider before introducing remote working?

When you’re working with a distributed team, communication is key, and as the employer, it’s your job to provide the resources and systems to make this happen. Typically, these might include:

• Laptops and other tech as required
• Guidelines around the use of public wifi for business critical activities to ensure you protect sensitive business information
• Compensation if an employee is using their home internet connection
• A way to stay in touch with the team, beyond email. Platforms like Slack are great for team communication
• Guidelines around how often and in what way the entire team will catch up
• Project management tools that are accessible for every worker

With these essentials in place, the biggest factor in making remote work a success is workplace culture. Consider up-skilling your management team to make sure they are ready to support your remote staff or even to give them the skills to allow them to do their roles remotely.

Remote working can be isolating for an individual and sometimes the meaning in email and text can be lost so it is important to factor in a regular face-to-face meeting or video conference to bring coworkers together, enable mutual understanding and to build the team culture.

If you’re planning on introducing remote working to your team, make sure you have strong communication channels, and robust systems to support your flexible workers.

Talk to us about how we can help.

Your workspace can impact productivity

A great office space is about keeping your people happy, productive and working towards the key goals of your business.

An office is more than a place to put your desks, it is the heart of your business and the space where your people will spend most of their working day. Your office needs to create the right atmosphere for your people and inspire productivity.

A great workspace motivates your team

Engaged employees make their organisations 17% more productive and 21% more profitable, according to Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace report. Keeping your people engaged and motivated is a core aim of your workspace design.

There are some key universal traits that any good workspace will need if your aim is to boost team motivation, productivity levels and, ultimately, profitability.

A good workspace will include:

Flexible working options

A good office space should be an environment that's conducive to different types of work. If staff have different roles, and carry out different activities throughout the day, a mix of quiet spaces, communal areas, private meeting rooms and breakout space for catch-ups can cater for this.

Access to drinks and refreshments

Somewhere for staff to re-hydrate, refuel and stay productive. Offer free coffee and tea. A bowl of fruit or healthy snacks is a nice way to support time-poor employees who don’t have time to head out.

Privacy when it’s required

The seclusion of a meeting room is great for making for private calls, having team meetings or carrying out one-on-one conversations with employees and fellow directors.

Space to relax and kick back

Outside of the usual working day, a more social space in the office provides somewhere where people can hang out and enhance the social side of the team. The ‘creative agency with a foosball table’ has become a slight cliche, but having a space with comfortable furniture and recreational activities can be a real plus for many employees.

Great branding and design 

The design of the workspace isn’t just about the choice of paint colour. It's important to create an aesthetic and ergonomic design that reflects your brand personality, but also works as a highly effective space for your people. A professionally designed and branded workspace can have a huge impact on how your staff and customers perceive your company.

Enhancing your workspace

If you’re looking to refresh your office space, think about the elements that will improve the experience for your staff and your customers. A successful office revamp makes everyone happy and boosts productivity.

Looking after yourself as a small business owner?

As a small business owner, do you find looking after yourself a challenge?

Owning and working in a small business can eat up all your spare time. Exercise or time for yourself is often the first thing that is abandoned to fit in the many other things you have to do in a day. And while many of us finish the year with lofty goals for exercise in the new year, these lofty goals can be hard to achieve.

Is this you?

Here’s an idea… 

Instead of setting goals that are vague and big, set smaller more specific goals that are much easier to achieve.

Make a point of getting outside every single day and getting ‘a little’ exercise. It doesn’t have to be a gym membership, a bootcamp or going running.

Even just a walk around the block will be a step in the right direction!

A study in the journal Preventive Medicine found that just by minimising sedentary activities, and replacing some of them with light-intensity activities can achieve benefits for your health.

Easy actions

So start small and stick to it. Soon you’ll be benefiting from the short time away from work, more time to think, and the fresh air.

For a healthy lifestyle, the adult recommendation is at least 30 minutes of moderate physical activity on five or more days per week. This will not only increase your quality of life but also your sense of wellbeing.

Developing great leadership to scale your business

There are several aspects of successfully scaling up your business one being having comprehensive systems. Another being developing great leadership.

Have you heard the quote,

“What got you here won’t get you there”?

These are wise words (and the title of a book we encourage you to read!) are from Marshall Goldsmith.

When choosing to scale your business many leaders focus on their systems and teams, which is important. But you should also focus on scaling yourself.

Developing great leadership

Most reasons why businesses fail, directly and indirectly, point to leadership failure.

From poor planning to poor hiring, poor communication to poor process, poor capacity to poor execution - most things can be fixed with great leadership.

Scaling the business will make new demands on a leader’s time and attention. And it’s critical that these are both focused on the right things:

1. Planning

Setting a clear vision and relevant business goals. Having a regularly reviewing progress. And resetting goals to drive performance improvement.

2. Inspiring

Motivating others to achieve more than before. Showing them their potential to make an impact.

3. Empowering

Enabling your team to find their own solutions by guiding them with your support, trust and encouragement.

4. Culture

Demonstrating allegiance to your team and standing for the business’s core values.

5. Innovating

Continuous improvement in people, product, and process.

6. Personal growth

Developing and supporting your future leaders with mentoring and guidance.

Great leadership is about influencing others in the direction of a common goal.

While there can only be one leader of a business, there are different areas that need individual leaders. People can lead multiple areas initially. But, as the business grows, look to empower others. Delegate the leadership of some areas to ‘leaders in training’.

On a scale from 1 to 10, how well do you rate your performance on the above six categories?

Where can you scale your leadership?

If you need help? Get in touch.

“The function of leadership is to produce more leaders, not more followers.” - Ralph Nader

Establishing document systems and processes

With growth comes growing pains. Such pains can affect team morale as well as your margins. It’s critical to preempt potential friction and put systems in place to ensure you scale up with minimal disruption. 

It’s essential that you regularly review your business’s systems and have clearly documented processes in place - for consistency, efficiency, and so that you can delegate more responsibilities to your team.

Nine steps to establish great systems:

1. Identify your key systems.

Focus on documenting your most critical processes first. These may be customer focused, those where only one person knows how to perform the task, the tasks currently causing the most friction, or those preventing you from being paid on time.

​2. Develop a standardised approach to documenting your systems.

Document processes from start to finish in a concise, logical, and visual way. Start with diagrams or flowcharts, as they’re easier to digest, then embellish each step with text. Where necessary, include ‘how to’ guides, checklists, and templates (such as welcome letters or customer response email templates) within each system to ensure consistency and efficiency.

3. Break down each step into bite sized pieces.

If an overarching process requires touch from multiple team members, ensure the process includes the necessary communication points (so ‘Person B’ knows it’s time to do their piece), and that it’s clear which role has overall responsibility for completing the process.

4. Clearly label and store your procedural documents.

Your team needs to be able to access and execute procedures fast. Online document storage is best (the trees will thank you).

5. Identify the best person to draft each process.

If it’s a finance task, it’s likely someone within the Finance department should draft the system. This need not be a highly onerous task for the business owner, however, taking time to review these will save time and reduce rework in future.

6. Test the process!

Unless it involves learning how to use software, a new team member should be able to pick up a procedure and perform a task with little or no support.

7. Team training.

Include relevant procedures in new team member induction and make it clear to your team that they’re expected to follow the system. If mistakes are made, blame the system, not the person… and improve the system.

8. Review the process!

Regularly review and update your systems to ensure they’re still best practice. Empower the team to ‘own’ the systems they use and encourage them to drive improvements. Resist the urge to dictate how things must work, as those using the systems will have a better understanding of improvement opportunities.

9. Consider what can be automated or streamlined.

Technology is moving at a rapid pace. Encourage the ‘techies’ in your team to suggest automation opportunities, apps, or software solutions that could help your business scale better. A small investment could lead to a massive time saving - time is money!

“Speed is useful only if you are running in the right direction.” - Joel Barker

We can help you review and improve your critical business processes. Get in touch!

Use the Fresh Start Effect to achieve positive change

Have you heard of the Fresh Start Effect?

Around the world, people usually start each new year by setting goals and making positive changes. 

The reason that the new year can be such a great time to make changes is that the date provides a clear ‘temporal landmark’. Temporal landmarks give us an opportunity to step back, survey our lives and figure out what things we’d like to tweak.

At new year, we set goals to harness the energy of a resolution and create what’s known as the Fresh Start Effect.

It is important, however, to make sure that you understand what you’re trying to achieve, and create goals that are more likely to succeed.

Making changes or starting something new is easier with these techniques:

Making a public commitment

Announce your new goal on social media. If your friends and family get behind your goal, you’re more likely to be accountable and more likely to succeed.

Join a group

If you want to pick up a sport, start a new hobby, or pick give something up, consider joining a group. Again, this is a great way to create accountability. If you’re worried about letting down other people, you’re more likely to commit or show up!

Be specific

When you’re setting goals, be exact. If you want to make your business more efficient, know what this means in practice. For example, implementing the right apps to help automate some of your core processes requires research about what is going to suit your business the most. Set your goal with dates and times in mind about what you're going to research and when. And put them into your calendar.

Talk to us about automation

If your Fresh Start for 2020 involves implementing automation, talk to us. We can review you business processes and identify the automation opportunities, helping you choose the best apps to drive your business efficiently.

Contact us here.

How to make your out-of-office email work harder when you're away

There are a few essentials your out-of-office message needs to contain. Before you try anything fun with yours, make sure you have the essentials covered.

Check that your auto-response has:

• A title that lets your recipient know this is an out-of-office message (some email services will do this automatically)
• The dates you’re out of the office, and the date you’ll be back in action
• Whether you can be contacted, and the correct contact details. Be really clear about when you’d expect to be contacted. You’re on holiday, so it’s fine to reserve this option for emergency use only
• Who they can speak to in your absence, what they’re responsible for, and how they can get in touch

So, here are a few ideas:

• Share your favourite post from the company blog
• Add a sign up for your newsletter into the text
• Add a link to your Instagram account so that they can follow along with your holiday adventures
• Spice up your message with a gif or some well-chosen emojis
• If your company supports a charity, use this space to share some information about the work they do at this time of year

Or, if you’re ready to really take things to the next level, try a humorous message. Done properly, this is a great way to brighten the day of the person getting your bounce-back. Of course, you’ll need to consider all of the people who could be emailing you during this time, and how they might respond. If in doubt, play it straight.

Here’s some clever out-of-office message inspiration from Grammarly:

Heading out of the office? Don’t let your business affairs slide. Book an appointment with us to make sure you are covered for the holiday period.

Talk to us about how we can help.

Have you got a strategy for a financially stress-free holiday period?

Christmas holiday breaks are a time to spend with family, friends & have a chance to recharge for the year ahead. We look forward to warmer weather and finally setting up an out-of-office email for the break. However, for business owners, this time can be stressful without careful cash-flow planning.

Even if you do continue to operate through the holiday shutdown season, your customers' financial behaviour may not remain the same.

It can be pretty disappointing to work hard all year only to find that once you have paid staff, overheads and creditors, you have little or nothing left in the bank to cover your own time off.

The strategies and tips shared below are generalised, however, we are here if you need to budget and prepare a cash-flow forecast. We can also help if you need assistance in applying for short term finance to get you through the break.

Why is cash-flow planning particularly important at this time of year?

Staff leave needs to be covered in addition to your normal fixed overheads like rent, creditors and tax compliance. The budget and forecasting process ensures you know your numbers and are prepared. If you are shutting down, you won't be driving revenue during this period and sales may take time to get started again in the new year.

Here are some simple strategies that can help:

Decide your Christmas and holiday break dates

Confirm these with staff, customers and suppliers.

Budget and plan for annual leave 

Remember the pay rates may be higher than standard hourly rates, also factor in statutory public holidays.

Decide

If you are going to pay out leave in full at the beginning of the Christmas break or continue to pay as usual throughout the break.

Review your work in progress (WIP)

Plan to complete jobs or services that can be invoiced and paid before Christmas (remember if you don’t invoice and get paid before Christmas, you may not see the money until mid to late January).

Capacity planning

There is often a rush to get everything done before Christmas, whether it's the kitchen benchtop installed or the beauty treatment before the break, so make sure you have the capacity to maximise on this.

Stock-take

Do you need to order in goods now to be able to complete work in progress? Check that there is stock on hand available.

Making an arrangement with the Tax Office

if you find you can not make payments, it is possible to apply for an instalment arrangement. There are costs associated with this, however it may provide a solution that gets you through the holiday period. Talk to us, we can help.

Talk to us about enhancing your financial support

If you can’t make ends meet, now is the time to organise short term financial relief like an arranged overdraft of loan, rather than hoping it will come right. Please let us know if you need any help with cash-flow forecasting, budgeting or finance applications.

Get in touch to improve your cash flow.

Finding the balance

Looking for a little more work-life balance?

Sometimes it seems impossible when you are in the thick of it. The following ideas might help provide some light at the end of the tunnel.

Prioritise

Work often dictates to us, rather than the other way around. Create a list of all the things that need doing and categorise them. For example, work out the tasks that are ‘important but not urgent’ and ‘urgent but not important’. Task or project management tools like Trello can simplify your workload and and help to prioritise your time.

Delegate

Letting go can be an opportunity for others in the team to shine. Alternatively, bring in a contractor to help clear the load and you may find they bring in new ideas, create opportunities or streamline the process. Don’t limit yourself to what’s on at work - think about what would help at home too, such as a meal kit delivery to simplify the end of the day.

Book it in the diary

We are all guilty of putting off an exercise class or a coffee catch up because work takes over. These events are important for your mental and physical health and may give you space for creative thought or the ability to think with more clarity. Plus, you’ll return to work feeling more productive. Book it in and consider joining a group so you are more committed to turning up!

Use the technology to help you

‘Always on’ technology such as smart phones are designed to make life easier but we’ve ended up busier than ever. So choose the apps and tools that can reduce the stress. Whether it’s for communication and meetings, or your filing and accounting. An app could save you time and allow you to get on with other things - read more on apps. We can help with the right accounting software solution to reduce the paperwork.

Share with your network

Are there individuals in your network who face the same challenges or can help you achieve your goals? Set up a monthly breakfast to catch up, support and learn from each other. You’ll go back to work with new inspiration.

Do what you love

At the end of the day, your work is ‘part of’ your life not separate from it, so if you enjoy it, you’ll feel you have more ‘balance’.

Get in touch to talk about how we can help you achieve balance in your business.