Welcome to Business Management
Sunday, September 7, 2008
Leadership Tips - Stand Up Meetings
Do any of these statements apply to you?
* My calendar is so filled with meetings I can't find time to get real work done.
* Meetings that I attend seem to expand to fill the allotted time; we could accomplish just as much in half the time.
* I know we need the daily ops meeting (or the weekly project status meeting) but it's becoming tedious.
Most of us can relate to at least one of these statements, many can relate to all three and probably add a few more bullets of their own.
The best thing you can do with a meeting that is not a good use of your time is to not attend.
But what about meetings that you know are needed? Information needs to be shared, action items need to be assigned. Email won't work, because there's too much of a chance for misunderstanding and you need face to face discussion.
Try the stand up meeting.
Its very name conveys a message that no one is going to come in and settle into a comfortable position for this meeting. Stand up meetings are perfect for regular status updates and efficient assignment of work activities.
Here are some considerations that will help you hold effective and efficient stand up meetings:
Location: Ideally, hold the meeting in an open area with no tables or chairs. Lobbies, vacant offices, an open corner are all good candidates. If you have to use a conference room, push the table and chairs against the wall and don't let anyone sit down.
Chair Person: Think drill sergeant. This is not a role for the timid. You need someone who will start the meeting on time, even if no one is there! He or she needs to work the agenda rigidly, cut off discussion and send it offline when needed, clearly outline the action items and end on time.
Agenda: Keep it very crisp. Total agenda time should not exceed 15 minutes. Status updates should be limited to 5 minutes. Don't be afraid to have 2 minute items if that's all that's needed. Cover the open items from last meeting. Are they closed? If not, carry them forward with clear owners.
Don't provide coffee or heaven forbid, food. You can even go one step further and not allow people to bring their own. That will make everyone focus on getting done.
Now when you read all this it sounds harsh, but that's nor the case. When you value other people's time they will be appreciative. That is exactly what you are doing here.
Run a stand up meeting well, and people will know they can show up, get up to speed, be confident they know who is working on what, and get back to work.
* My calendar is so filled with meetings I can't find time to get real work done.
* Meetings that I attend seem to expand to fill the allotted time; we could accomplish just as much in half the time.
* I know we need the daily ops meeting (or the weekly project status meeting) but it's becoming tedious.
Most of us can relate to at least one of these statements, many can relate to all three and probably add a few more bullets of their own.
The best thing you can do with a meeting that is not a good use of your time is to not attend.
But what about meetings that you know are needed? Information needs to be shared, action items need to be assigned. Email won't work, because there's too much of a chance for misunderstanding and you need face to face discussion.
Try the stand up meeting.
Its very name conveys a message that no one is going to come in and settle into a comfortable position for this meeting. Stand up meetings are perfect for regular status updates and efficient assignment of work activities.
Here are some considerations that will help you hold effective and efficient stand up meetings:
Location: Ideally, hold the meeting in an open area with no tables or chairs. Lobbies, vacant offices, an open corner are all good candidates. If you have to use a conference room, push the table and chairs against the wall and don't let anyone sit down.
Chair Person: Think drill sergeant. This is not a role for the timid. You need someone who will start the meeting on time, even if no one is there! He or she needs to work the agenda rigidly, cut off discussion and send it offline when needed, clearly outline the action items and end on time.
Agenda: Keep it very crisp. Total agenda time should not exceed 15 minutes. Status updates should be limited to 5 minutes. Don't be afraid to have 2 minute items if that's all that's needed. Cover the open items from last meeting. Are they closed? If not, carry them forward with clear owners.
Don't provide coffee or heaven forbid, food. You can even go one step further and not allow people to bring their own. That will make everyone focus on getting done.
Now when you read all this it sounds harsh, but that's nor the case. When you value other people's time they will be appreciative. That is exactly what you are doing here.
Run a stand up meeting well, and people will know they can show up, get up to speed, be confident they know who is working on what, and get back to work.
Labels: Leadership Tips - Stand Up Meetings
James Bellini - Historian of the Future
As far as job titles go, 'Historian of the Future' is an absolutely doozy. However, as one of the leading practitioners of this fascinating trade, Dr James Bellini, can testify, the description can lead to a few misunderstandings: he is most definitely not, for instance, a magician.
"Let me be clear: I don't have a cloak, a pointy hat and a magic wand," Bellini jokes - and he absolutely can't tell you who's going to win the 3.30 at Ascot. What he can do, however, is draw upon a career spanning decades of research and analysis, networking and award-winning creative endeavours to produce assessments of the likely state of the future which are as informed, and as entertaining, as any you'll encounter.
When SSON meets Bellini, the good doctor - whose PhD "in military stuff" came from the London School of Economics - has just finished presenting to the 8th Annual Shared Services Week in Sitges, near Barcelona. His talk - the first plenary of the event - has ranged from early corporate history, via demographic change in modern Europe, through 'Gutenberg 2.0', to the rise of a new wave of consumers and the hiring challenges posed by the emergence of 'Generation C'- and he's scattered some pretty brain-bending statistics along the way.
For example, those of us in the audience now know that by 2040, if current trends are maintained, Italy will have 20 million fewer inhabitants; that "in 1965 there were 10,000 people for every computer, but by 2015 there will be 10,000 connected devices for every person"; that "over 50 per cent of people on the planet have never made a phone call"; that by 2020 Japan will be the oldest society in the developed world, and the USA will be the youngest.
It's from a vast archive of such data, analysed through methods many years in the perfecting, that Bellini is able to create the "works of informed imagination" that make up his futurological output. Facts and figures, he says, are the currency of futurology and he declares that, magpie-like, he "will steal anything without remorse" which will contribute to his understanding of the myriad forces shaping the times to come.
This understanding has developed over the course of a distinguished and varied career which has seen Bellini finding success as an academic, a think-tank analyst, a reporter and TV presenter, an author, a narrator and, of course, a public speaker. If, however, this suggests chameleonic professional tendencies to accompany his corvine approach to data, Bellini's wry grin, penetrating stare and uncompromising wit mark him out as resolutely human - as does his unwillingness to pander to social niceties: his latest book, tackling corporate deceit and the pervasiveness of misrepresentation in the business world, is appropriately titled The Bullshit Factor.
Bellini moved from university (St John's College, Cambridge) into advertising, among other roles - but it was in Paris as the first British member of the highly regarded Hudson Institute (co-founded by Bellini's early mentor, nuclear strategist Herman Kahn) where he won his spurs, and plaudits, with a series of predictions for major European economies, starting with France. He and his colleagues were a long way ahead of the curve in foreseeing the French economic revival of the 1970s and '80s, and their success did not go unnoticed; brought in by the BBC as a consultant on a similar predictive piece about the British economy, Bellini ended up fronting the program as lead reporter. Perhaps unpredictably - even for this most promising of seers - television, and a modicum of fame, had come knocking.
Although he discusses his successes with disarming humility, Bellini's career in television left him much to crow about: seven years as a studio presenter with Sky News and Financial Times Television; stints presenting Panorama, Newsnight and The Money Programme; and a host of awards including the Prince Rainier II Prize at the Monte Carlo International TV festival and a special award given by the United Nations for his work on the epic documentary series The Nuclear Age - as well as rather less glittering roles such as presenting a TV version of Cluedo. Meanwhile he continued to predict, to analyse - and to publish, with a series of well-received tomes reaching the shelves from the 1980s onwards.
By now Bellini had established a reputation as one of the most perceptive and intuitive pundits on the current affairs circuit, and the step to public speaking to compliment his flourishing literary career was a logical one. His natural flair for business (he has served in executive positions for numerous companies) and for communications, combined with his specific spheres of interest, mean that - although he's just as happy to present to the likes of Greenpeace "for a cup of tea"- his natural constituency consists of relatively high-powered businessfolk with a vested interest in understanding the foundations of the future (exactly the kind of people attending Shared Services Week, in fact).
And some future it'll be. Bellini paints a fascinating picture of societies, businesses and economies on the brink of truly fundamental change; while he maintains that in general "nothing is ever really new - it might be different, but it's not new", at the same time he posits developments which, in terms of the way organisations are structured and run, are as new as anything which has preceded them since the Stone Age.
"Shared services is not the sexiest area of management, but it's one of the most important. It is about creating things which haven't been seen before in business history: internally profit-driven services. This is not, however, truly revolutionary: yet in the next 10-15 years I do see a revolution, a period comparable with the beginning of corporate history," he says. "We'll see as much change [in organisational structure] in the next 15 years as we saw in the last 5,000."
A major facilitator for this restructuring is, of course, the globalising information revolution, which is occurring at a mind-boggling rate.
"The pace of change is becoming a lot more compressed... Moore's Law is probably already out of date. We have to generate new words to deal with the rate at which information is growing," he says, citing as an example the rise of the "exabyte" - one billion billion bytes or, in more antique terms, one trillion big books full of data.
The implications for business of this staggering acceleration of development are, of course, manifold; but Bellini sees one of the most crucial impacts taking place in the field of recruitment and HR, and beyond that in the way business itself is conducted on a personal level.
"The people you employ in future will be very different from those you've employed in the past," he cautions. "Your future talent comes from what some people call Generation Y but I prefer to call Generation C" - the connected, communicating, completely digital creator-generators currently en route to adulthood.
"They are digital natives, very different individuals, living, educated and working in digital spaces. Sharing is instinctive among them... It's not about being selfish but about cooperating in effective, efficient ways."
Bellini believes that the arrival of this generation will force employers to reassess age-old practices such as recruitment, interview techniques and training. After all, this is a generation with a decreasing attention span but a marked increase in the ability to multitask and shift from one task to another very quickly; if a trainer begins to lose the attention of his or her trainees, Bellini asks, who will be to blame - the trainees, who have developed in a fast-changing, rapid-fire digital environment, or the trainer, who has not? The answer is implicit in the question, and Bellini warns that companies expecting their new recruits to bend to an established, 'old' modus operandi will find themselves left behind: "the talent war will become more acute," he says, and it's a war no company will be able to afford to lose.
The nature of employment itself will also change, the doctor reckons. Long-term contracts in fixed locations will become increasingly obsolete; the future will be made up of task-based employment of "clusters" of employees coming together to address specific needs, offering complementary skills for comparatively short, intense bursts of productivity - often working at distance from homes around the world.
For older employees such a shift might represent a vast challenge and perhaps an assault on traditional comforts such as job security; for the digital natives of Generation C, however, such practices will be second nature - and Bellini uses the example of Hollywood film production, which has been from the off a task-based environment, as how businesses and entire industries can work on a different, and potentially formidable, model.
The future will also bring us a very different consumer class, Bellini promises. Societies are getting older, and the old are becoming more affluent: in the UK, for example, in this "New Age of consumers" over-50s already own over 80 per cent of the nation's assets, and the country has reached a tipping point when there are more retirees than there are children. Meanwhile family sizes are decreasing, creating a growing deficit in the workforce of the future: we are approaching the "post-kids future", Bellini says somewhat ominously.
"This has huge consequences for everyone," he says. "Take R&D: the reason cars are the way they are, with four seats, is because the nuclear family model was the dominant one when car design was at its most dynamic. Four family members required four seats. Now the nuclear family is not the dominant model: what will the layout be of the car of the future? Or take cereal packets: they were sized for a nuclear family. Now that size is no longer appropriate."
Different needs require different provisions and Bellini urges today's companies to plan properly for a very different breed of consumer. The older generation - which will live longer than any in human history - will have different high-value requirements which will need to be met; meanwhile, the younger generation will be comparatively less affluent but will have very different needs and will expect those needs to be met in very different ways. Marketing, design, sales: all will have to undergo their own revolutions.
"There is a conversation going on, a huge worldwide conversation. You will not control this conversation, though it will be about you and will impact upon you," he cautions. Of course, this lack of control might terrify many businesses and practitioners - especially those in shared services for whom maintaining the right level of control over processes is such a fundamental aspect of the job - but it also represents a unique opportunity.
If, as Bellini assures us, the next few years will see us having to "revisit the idea of how to think", such reengagement with processes and the reasons behind them - driven in no small way by the digital natives making up the next generation of employees - will surely lead to sweeping changes in almost every aspect of doing business. The cost and efficiency savings currently held up as world-class by leading shared service practitioners could pale into insignificance against the benefits - tangible and intangible - brought by new approaches to the very raison d'etre of business and the economy, and by the technological revolution whose ultimate consequences even this most esteemed of futurologists can only ponder from afar.
"Let me be clear: I don't have a cloak, a pointy hat and a magic wand," Bellini jokes - and he absolutely can't tell you who's going to win the 3.30 at Ascot. What he can do, however, is draw upon a career spanning decades of research and analysis, networking and award-winning creative endeavours to produce assessments of the likely state of the future which are as informed, and as entertaining, as any you'll encounter.
When SSON meets Bellini, the good doctor - whose PhD "in military stuff" came from the London School of Economics - has just finished presenting to the 8th Annual Shared Services Week in Sitges, near Barcelona. His talk - the first plenary of the event - has ranged from early corporate history, via demographic change in modern Europe, through 'Gutenberg 2.0', to the rise of a new wave of consumers and the hiring challenges posed by the emergence of 'Generation C'- and he's scattered some pretty brain-bending statistics along the way.
For example, those of us in the audience now know that by 2040, if current trends are maintained, Italy will have 20 million fewer inhabitants; that "in 1965 there were 10,000 people for every computer, but by 2015 there will be 10,000 connected devices for every person"; that "over 50 per cent of people on the planet have never made a phone call"; that by 2020 Japan will be the oldest society in the developed world, and the USA will be the youngest.
It's from a vast archive of such data, analysed through methods many years in the perfecting, that Bellini is able to create the "works of informed imagination" that make up his futurological output. Facts and figures, he says, are the currency of futurology and he declares that, magpie-like, he "will steal anything without remorse" which will contribute to his understanding of the myriad forces shaping the times to come.
This understanding has developed over the course of a distinguished and varied career which has seen Bellini finding success as an academic, a think-tank analyst, a reporter and TV presenter, an author, a narrator and, of course, a public speaker. If, however, this suggests chameleonic professional tendencies to accompany his corvine approach to data, Bellini's wry grin, penetrating stare and uncompromising wit mark him out as resolutely human - as does his unwillingness to pander to social niceties: his latest book, tackling corporate deceit and the pervasiveness of misrepresentation in the business world, is appropriately titled The Bullshit Factor.
Bellini moved from university (St John's College, Cambridge) into advertising, among other roles - but it was in Paris as the first British member of the highly regarded Hudson Institute (co-founded by Bellini's early mentor, nuclear strategist Herman Kahn) where he won his spurs, and plaudits, with a series of predictions for major European economies, starting with France. He and his colleagues were a long way ahead of the curve in foreseeing the French economic revival of the 1970s and '80s, and their success did not go unnoticed; brought in by the BBC as a consultant on a similar predictive piece about the British economy, Bellini ended up fronting the program as lead reporter. Perhaps unpredictably - even for this most promising of seers - television, and a modicum of fame, had come knocking.
Although he discusses his successes with disarming humility, Bellini's career in television left him much to crow about: seven years as a studio presenter with Sky News and Financial Times Television; stints presenting Panorama, Newsnight and The Money Programme; and a host of awards including the Prince Rainier II Prize at the Monte Carlo International TV festival and a special award given by the United Nations for his work on the epic documentary series The Nuclear Age - as well as rather less glittering roles such as presenting a TV version of Cluedo. Meanwhile he continued to predict, to analyse - and to publish, with a series of well-received tomes reaching the shelves from the 1980s onwards.
By now Bellini had established a reputation as one of the most perceptive and intuitive pundits on the current affairs circuit, and the step to public speaking to compliment his flourishing literary career was a logical one. His natural flair for business (he has served in executive positions for numerous companies) and for communications, combined with his specific spheres of interest, mean that - although he's just as happy to present to the likes of Greenpeace "for a cup of tea"- his natural constituency consists of relatively high-powered businessfolk with a vested interest in understanding the foundations of the future (exactly the kind of people attending Shared Services Week, in fact).
And some future it'll be. Bellini paints a fascinating picture of societies, businesses and economies on the brink of truly fundamental change; while he maintains that in general "nothing is ever really new - it might be different, but it's not new", at the same time he posits developments which, in terms of the way organisations are structured and run, are as new as anything which has preceded them since the Stone Age.
"Shared services is not the sexiest area of management, but it's one of the most important. It is about creating things which haven't been seen before in business history: internally profit-driven services. This is not, however, truly revolutionary: yet in the next 10-15 years I do see a revolution, a period comparable with the beginning of corporate history," he says. "We'll see as much change [in organisational structure] in the next 15 years as we saw in the last 5,000."
A major facilitator for this restructuring is, of course, the globalising information revolution, which is occurring at a mind-boggling rate.
"The pace of change is becoming a lot more compressed... Moore's Law is probably already out of date. We have to generate new words to deal with the rate at which information is growing," he says, citing as an example the rise of the "exabyte" - one billion billion bytes or, in more antique terms, one trillion big books full of data.
The implications for business of this staggering acceleration of development are, of course, manifold; but Bellini sees one of the most crucial impacts taking place in the field of recruitment and HR, and beyond that in the way business itself is conducted on a personal level.
"The people you employ in future will be very different from those you've employed in the past," he cautions. "Your future talent comes from what some people call Generation Y but I prefer to call Generation C" - the connected, communicating, completely digital creator-generators currently en route to adulthood.
"They are digital natives, very different individuals, living, educated and working in digital spaces. Sharing is instinctive among them... It's not about being selfish but about cooperating in effective, efficient ways."
Bellini believes that the arrival of this generation will force employers to reassess age-old practices such as recruitment, interview techniques and training. After all, this is a generation with a decreasing attention span but a marked increase in the ability to multitask and shift from one task to another very quickly; if a trainer begins to lose the attention of his or her trainees, Bellini asks, who will be to blame - the trainees, who have developed in a fast-changing, rapid-fire digital environment, or the trainer, who has not? The answer is implicit in the question, and Bellini warns that companies expecting their new recruits to bend to an established, 'old' modus operandi will find themselves left behind: "the talent war will become more acute," he says, and it's a war no company will be able to afford to lose.
The nature of employment itself will also change, the doctor reckons. Long-term contracts in fixed locations will become increasingly obsolete; the future will be made up of task-based employment of "clusters" of employees coming together to address specific needs, offering complementary skills for comparatively short, intense bursts of productivity - often working at distance from homes around the world.
For older employees such a shift might represent a vast challenge and perhaps an assault on traditional comforts such as job security; for the digital natives of Generation C, however, such practices will be second nature - and Bellini uses the example of Hollywood film production, which has been from the off a task-based environment, as how businesses and entire industries can work on a different, and potentially formidable, model.
The future will also bring us a very different consumer class, Bellini promises. Societies are getting older, and the old are becoming more affluent: in the UK, for example, in this "New Age of consumers" over-50s already own over 80 per cent of the nation's assets, and the country has reached a tipping point when there are more retirees than there are children. Meanwhile family sizes are decreasing, creating a growing deficit in the workforce of the future: we are approaching the "post-kids future", Bellini says somewhat ominously.
"This has huge consequences for everyone," he says. "Take R&D: the reason cars are the way they are, with four seats, is because the nuclear family model was the dominant one when car design was at its most dynamic. Four family members required four seats. Now the nuclear family is not the dominant model: what will the layout be of the car of the future? Or take cereal packets: they were sized for a nuclear family. Now that size is no longer appropriate."
Different needs require different provisions and Bellini urges today's companies to plan properly for a very different breed of consumer. The older generation - which will live longer than any in human history - will have different high-value requirements which will need to be met; meanwhile, the younger generation will be comparatively less affluent but will have very different needs and will expect those needs to be met in very different ways. Marketing, design, sales: all will have to undergo their own revolutions.
"There is a conversation going on, a huge worldwide conversation. You will not control this conversation, though it will be about you and will impact upon you," he cautions. Of course, this lack of control might terrify many businesses and practitioners - especially those in shared services for whom maintaining the right level of control over processes is such a fundamental aspect of the job - but it also represents a unique opportunity.
If, as Bellini assures us, the next few years will see us having to "revisit the idea of how to think", such reengagement with processes and the reasons behind them - driven in no small way by the digital natives making up the next generation of employees - will surely lead to sweeping changes in almost every aspect of doing business. The cost and efficiency savings currently held up as world-class by leading shared service practitioners could pale into insignificance against the benefits - tangible and intangible - brought by new approaches to the very raison d'etre of business and the economy, and by the technological revolution whose ultimate consequences even this most esteemed of futurologists can only ponder from afar.
Labels: James Bellini - Historian of the Future
Giving 300 Percent
If you've heard it once, you've heard it one hundred ten times--that overused cliché urging you to give 110%! But, times change and 110% is no longer good enough. If I am in a leadership role I want 300% from my people. You should, too. This isn't about inflation; it's about a better way of thinking about motivation and employee productivity. But, if giving 110% seemed hard, then wouldn't 300% be nearly impossible? Not with the right kind of leadership. Let's take a look.
When people show up to work, you already have 100% of them. You have their physical bodies. Let's call this their hands. The show up and execute tasks in order to deliver some level of production that will enable them to keep their jobs and keep getting a paycheck. However, in business, having just 100% of someone won't bring about success because you are missing 200%--a very critical 200%.
The next 100% is their head-more specifically, their brains. When we get this 100%, we get a thinking contributor to the team. They are not satisfied by simply doing the work. Seeking out intellectual stimulation, they like to think up better ways to do the work. They enjoy being recognized for the contributions they make to the team, and being asked, "What do you think?"
With hands and head, we have 200%. That's not bad, but it's not enough to defeat your competition, whose employees are giving 300%. And that final 100% is the heart. When we get this from our employees, we get their dedication and commitment to the task and to the cause. People who put their heart into their work jump in with both feet and are emotionally engaged in what they do. But, the only way to get your employees to bring this to the job is for leadership to treat them with trust and respect, and to help them see their contribution to the bigger picture. These folks come to work because they want to--not because they have to. They are bright, and emotionally committed to the objectives of the firm. The companies that get 300% from their employees are the ones that win in business.
I realize that 300% is optimal. Maybe on some days, we get 100% of their hands (meaning they showed up for work), 55% of their head, and 71% of their heart. That's still significantly better than a measly 110%. Of course, if they don't show up, you get 0%. Employees who are not challenged to use their head and heart are much more likely to be absent from work. But those who are asked to contribute 200% and 300% have greater reliability. It has everything to do with feeling like you are making a valuable contribution and that you truly are part of the team.
I encourage you to start looking at your people through these three lenses. If they're not showing up--if you don't even get their hands on a regular basis--do you really have room for them on your team? But, just coming in isn't enough. Are they thinking on the job? Are they looking for and suggesting new and better ways to get the work done? Finally, are they passionate about what the company does, and their role in it? The only chance you have for people to give you 300% is to lead them well. In other words, are you giving 300%, too?
When people show up to work, you already have 100% of them. You have their physical bodies. Let's call this their hands. The show up and execute tasks in order to deliver some level of production that will enable them to keep their jobs and keep getting a paycheck. However, in business, having just 100% of someone won't bring about success because you are missing 200%--a very critical 200%.
The next 100% is their head-more specifically, their brains. When we get this 100%, we get a thinking contributor to the team. They are not satisfied by simply doing the work. Seeking out intellectual stimulation, they like to think up better ways to do the work. They enjoy being recognized for the contributions they make to the team, and being asked, "What do you think?"
With hands and head, we have 200%. That's not bad, but it's not enough to defeat your competition, whose employees are giving 300%. And that final 100% is the heart. When we get this from our employees, we get their dedication and commitment to the task and to the cause. People who put their heart into their work jump in with both feet and are emotionally engaged in what they do. But, the only way to get your employees to bring this to the job is for leadership to treat them with trust and respect, and to help them see their contribution to the bigger picture. These folks come to work because they want to--not because they have to. They are bright, and emotionally committed to the objectives of the firm. The companies that get 300% from their employees are the ones that win in business.
I realize that 300% is optimal. Maybe on some days, we get 100% of their hands (meaning they showed up for work), 55% of their head, and 71% of their heart. That's still significantly better than a measly 110%. Of course, if they don't show up, you get 0%. Employees who are not challenged to use their head and heart are much more likely to be absent from work. But those who are asked to contribute 200% and 300% have greater reliability. It has everything to do with feeling like you are making a valuable contribution and that you truly are part of the team.
I encourage you to start looking at your people through these three lenses. If they're not showing up--if you don't even get their hands on a regular basis--do you really have room for them on your team? But, just coming in isn't enough. Are they thinking on the job? Are they looking for and suggesting new and better ways to get the work done? Finally, are they passionate about what the company does, and their role in it? The only chance you have for people to give you 300% is to lead them well. In other words, are you giving 300%, too?
Labels: Giving 300 Percent
How Do You Choose the Right Company For Your Commercial Cleaning Needs?
When you have a commercial business there are many things that you need to do to keep your business running smoothly and to maintain the building your business is in. One of the things that you will need to do is to find a commercial cleaning company that can help you keep your business clean and maintained. There are many different companies that you can choose from for commercial cleaning but you need to find one that is close to your local area.
When you are trying to choose a commercial cleaning company you need to find one that strives to understand your business and how things work, so they can get their job done without disrupting yours. This will help you minimize any down time for your business but will also help you get the commercial cleaning done. The cleaning company that you choose needs to be able to carefully plan the cleaning process to make sure everything gets done without disruption to your business.
It is a good idea to find a commercial cleaning company that has multiple cleaning capabilities. This will mean that you can use the same company for all of your cleaning needs. You can even find a company that will handle the cleaning and landscaping for your building if needed. Many companies will have the ability to remove almost any type of material or waste with their cleaning equipment. You will need to find out what materials the company can remove, so that you will know who to contact if you have a waste to be removed.
A good company that handles commercial cleaning will not only use their top of the line equipment to offer you full service cleaning but they will also carefully plan their cleaning process for your business, which will mean that you wont have the down time because they will come in a clean when it wont be disruptive to you.
It is very important that you take the time to look at all of the different companies that you find to do your commercial cleaning. There are many of them available and you want to look online at their site to find out what they can offer you but you also want to contact them because you wont know if they will work the best for your business until you have a chance to talk to them and ask questions. Finding a commercial cleaning company doesn't have to be difficult but you do need to take the time to do your research before deciding.
When you are trying to choose a commercial cleaning company you need to find one that strives to understand your business and how things work, so they can get their job done without disrupting yours. This will help you minimize any down time for your business but will also help you get the commercial cleaning done. The cleaning company that you choose needs to be able to carefully plan the cleaning process to make sure everything gets done without disruption to your business.
It is a good idea to find a commercial cleaning company that has multiple cleaning capabilities. This will mean that you can use the same company for all of your cleaning needs. You can even find a company that will handle the cleaning and landscaping for your building if needed. Many companies will have the ability to remove almost any type of material or waste with their cleaning equipment. You will need to find out what materials the company can remove, so that you will know who to contact if you have a waste to be removed.
A good company that handles commercial cleaning will not only use their top of the line equipment to offer you full service cleaning but they will also carefully plan their cleaning process for your business, which will mean that you wont have the down time because they will come in a clean when it wont be disruptive to you.
It is very important that you take the time to look at all of the different companies that you find to do your commercial cleaning. There are many of them available and you want to look online at their site to find out what they can offer you but you also want to contact them because you wont know if they will work the best for your business until you have a chance to talk to them and ask questions. Finding a commercial cleaning company doesn't have to be difficult but you do need to take the time to do your research before deciding.
Labels: How Do You Choose the Right Company For Your Commercial Cleaning Needs
Removing Business Costs - Seven Deadly Sins to Avoid
Cost removal is just another form of change. Yet we see companies in every sector making the same mistakes time and again. So here are seven deadly sins of cost removal that it will pay you to avoid.
1. Cutting costs across the board A flat rate budget cut typically does more damage to the high-value, high-revenue parts of the business than you ever recover from cost savings. Worse, costs you cut like this will creep back within two years. Think instead about the causes of your costs and remove these instead.
2. Wimping out Fear of the impact of cost removal is no excuse for not doing it. Uncomfortable conversations now are much better than redundancy conversations later.
3. Waiting for perfect analysis If you are hemorrhaging cash now, every day's delay costs you money. A quick and dirty analysis will give you 95% of the data you need to proceed quickly and do straightaway most of the right things you need to save money. Is the extra 5% of certainty worth the extra days and weeks of delay?
4. Getting in your people's way Your people know better than you do where waste and inefficiency reside. They will find and eliminate it--provided you set demanding standards for delivery. If people know what is required of them, they will astonish you with their performance.
5. Spending more on compliance than you are saving Cost removal often means new policies and procedures. Yet in many companies the cost of complying with new policies far outweighs the savings that are made. Know how much it will cost to manage your new policies and only implement those which are cost-effective. As my mother would say: don't cut off your nose to spite your face.
6. Creating a new organisation structure Whenever the sky is falling, the first response of many corporate Chicken Lickens is to change the organisation. Usually this is a mistake. First, it distracts people from the real issue: running the business more efficiently. Second, it adds cost--cost to do it, cost as it beds down, and cost as new organisational interfaces are created. Third, it delays real action to improve performance. Fourth, companies hide behind it so that they don't have to talk about getting rid of people. So why do companies continue to do this? Usually because it is easy and looks like real action. But rearranging the deckchairs did not stop the Titanic sinking...
7. Damaging customer service to save costs This is not to say that you should avoid making customer service efficient--but never knowingly preside over a reduction in customer service standards for the sake of short-term savings. The savings will be temporary - the loss of customers, sales and reputation will not.
Many companies fail to improve their cost performance because they don't think effectively about which costs to remove and how best to do so quickly. If you avoid the seven deadly sins described here, however, you will have a fighting chance.
1. Cutting costs across the board A flat rate budget cut typically does more damage to the high-value, high-revenue parts of the business than you ever recover from cost savings. Worse, costs you cut like this will creep back within two years. Think instead about the causes of your costs and remove these instead.
2. Wimping out Fear of the impact of cost removal is no excuse for not doing it. Uncomfortable conversations now are much better than redundancy conversations later.
3. Waiting for perfect analysis If you are hemorrhaging cash now, every day's delay costs you money. A quick and dirty analysis will give you 95% of the data you need to proceed quickly and do straightaway most of the right things you need to save money. Is the extra 5% of certainty worth the extra days and weeks of delay?
4. Getting in your people's way Your people know better than you do where waste and inefficiency reside. They will find and eliminate it--provided you set demanding standards for delivery. If people know what is required of them, they will astonish you with their performance.
5. Spending more on compliance than you are saving Cost removal often means new policies and procedures. Yet in many companies the cost of complying with new policies far outweighs the savings that are made. Know how much it will cost to manage your new policies and only implement those which are cost-effective. As my mother would say: don't cut off your nose to spite your face.
6. Creating a new organisation structure Whenever the sky is falling, the first response of many corporate Chicken Lickens is to change the organisation. Usually this is a mistake. First, it distracts people from the real issue: running the business more efficiently. Second, it adds cost--cost to do it, cost as it beds down, and cost as new organisational interfaces are created. Third, it delays real action to improve performance. Fourth, companies hide behind it so that they don't have to talk about getting rid of people. So why do companies continue to do this? Usually because it is easy and looks like real action. But rearranging the deckchairs did not stop the Titanic sinking...
7. Damaging customer service to save costs This is not to say that you should avoid making customer service efficient--but never knowingly preside over a reduction in customer service standards for the sake of short-term savings. The savings will be temporary - the loss of customers, sales and reputation will not.
Many companies fail to improve their cost performance because they don't think effectively about which costs to remove and how best to do so quickly. If you avoid the seven deadly sins described here, however, you will have a fighting chance.
Labels: Removing Business Costs - Seven Deadly Sins to Avoid
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