Are you too busy to take a vacation this holiday season? Or, is work likely to intrude by cutting it short or interrupting your family time with phone calls and emails?
If you normally spend the season of goodwill chained to your desk or superglued to your cell phone, this is a warning sign that the way you run your business is becoming inefficient. Left unchecked and ignored, these inefficiencies will hamper your business’s ability to grow.
You may be caught in a common Catch-22 situation. You’re awesome at what you do, so your business starts to thrive, which means more work for you. But you’re not focusing on the stuff you’re awesome at; instead all you’re doing is the day-to-day admin.
Your time with your staff is not quality time. You’re too busy to spend much time on the things you are passionate about, or uniquely talented in – the very things that made your business flourish in the first place. These are all red flags that you’re not managing your business efficiently, and you need to rethink the processes you have in place to support you.
Downtime – your secret weapon
Let’s look at an example. Think of a busy store at your local mall. It’s the last minute rush before the stores close over the holiday season. Everyone is trying to get gifts for their loved ones and they are all descending on the cash registers at once. If the girl at the checkout is away from her post for more than a minute, things start to go wrong. The cash register stops ticking over, the line gets longer, customers get unhappy, and some of them abandon their carts and walk out.
Her manager, however, could probably be absent for an hour without any impact on the operation of the store. Take that right up to the CEO, who should have things organized to the extent that she could be unavailable for a month, and the business would still roll on efficiently. Her subordinates know what to do, processes are clear and robust.
The point is, the seniority and efficiency of a manager can be defined by the amount of time they are able to step away from the day-to-day operations (apart from an emergency or exceptional circumstances). This time away is actually a crucial asset of the business. It is used to generate ideas, coach and motivate people, formulate winning strategies and, of course, to recharge the batteries with the odd well-earned break.
If a middle manager or executive in a large organization is too busy to ever take a vacation, it’s a warning sign. They are bad at their job, or the processes meant to support them have failed. Either way, it’s something that needs to be fixed.
All of the same principles, and the same thinking, apply to any business. If you’re not getting the productive and recuperative downtime you need, most likely, the processes you need to support you are inadequate. The good news is there’s an easy fix – for any size or type of business. But we’ll talk about how to fix it in a moment.
Quality time – your greatest asset
Don’t make the mistake of thinking that the more time you spend in the business and talking to your staff, the better. If most of your interactions are about scheduling, admin, and sorting out crossed wires, that’s not quality time.
We all know what quality time means in relation to our families. I’m sure my parents spent as much time as I do in a week tying shoelaces, shouting ‘you’ll be late for school’ and the like, but I don’t remember any of that. I remember my dad teaching me how to ride a bike, my mom making me a choo-choo train birthday cake.
The very same idea applies to your business. An hour of coaching, inspiring, and praising staff achievements, is worth so much more than a day of procedural management.
Clockwork
The key to all of this is staff management that runs seamlessly, effortlessly, and predictably. People say “I want things to run like clockwork”. This is a great analogy, because a good timepiece is accurate, efficient, and a work of art to boot – but look at the mechanism behind it and you’ll see it is unbelievably complex.
You need a Deputy
One of the best ways to ensure your staff management runs just like clockwork is with a cloud-based solution. At Deputy, we believe we’ve created something that is extremely complex under the hood, but that is easy to use. Our mission is to create the business owners’ trusted, reliable second-in-charge, making it easier to manage staff and perform related tasks, saving you time and money so you can do the things you love.
The ultimate vision of Deputy is an intelligent agent which automates all aspects of workforce management so you can spend 100% of your time doing the things you are uniquely talented in, and passionate about, and therefore see your staff and business thrive and prosper. We want to give you back the down time and quality time you need to pursue your vision.
The Proof
We know we are delivering on this mission when we get feedback from customers like Peta Marlow, who is director of the Marlow Hotel group. Peta can take a vacation with peace of mind, knowing that Deputy is taking care of things, but she also knows that full visibility into what’s going on is as easy as picking up her smartphone. Deputy has become like an addictive social media app for Peta. She says “it’s better than Facebook” and has admitted to approving timesheets poolside at a resort in Thailand.
About the author
Mike McGee is chief product officer at Deputy. Mike has been building online products and businesses for 15+ years. He has also done his time as both manager and minion in hospitality and services businesses, so Deputy’s mission is in his DNA.
The post Taking a holiday these Holidays? Why the answer says a lot about your business. appeared first on GetApp Learning Center.
