Hey, don’t blame yourself. If you have business problems and inefficiency, this is how it is for most organisations. The trick is in spotting the problems, identifying the root cause and prevent it requiring a workaround. Where business problems are left to fester, they breed inefficiency. Most CEOs and MDs are aware of large business problems, but lack the time to understand the smaller ones. The large problems receive the benefit of their attention and focus to overcome them to carry on business. The small problems can proliferate, cascade and embed themselves into systems, processes and job roles. Over time, the aggregation of small problems becomes asphyxiating, hampering agility. So, today we discuss how to spot business problems and conquer inefficiency.
Business problems
A business problem is something that is not immediately solvable in the current organisational state. Business problems range from small (business-as-usual) and short-term (tactical) to large (disruptive) and long-term (strategic). Small problems may distract people from their day-to-day routine but not enough to warrant a change. Short-term, tactical problems are exactly that, meaning that they cause temporary ripples across people, processes, systems and/or partners until they are resolved. Large problems can stop day-to-day activities, which causes disruption and even business interruption, often resulting in backlogs or disruption of supply. Long-term problems can cause waves, which disperse your precious resources, often requiring transformative investments to overcome. Let’s now look at how to spot business problems.
How to spot business problems
How to spot business problems is straightforward. A repetitive query can indicate a process that is broken. A manual intervention to resolve can indicate a missing capability in your systems. Repeat queries from customers or suppliers imply that something is amiss. Delayed revenue recognition from late shipping, stock outs, high returns, increased refunds and growing bad debt are some of the financial indicators of business problems. These eventually erode profitability. Put simply, business problems interfere with, or prevent you from, carrying out the normal course of business along the path of least resistance.
Complex business problems stay that way unless the organisation bites the bullet. The degree of complexity varies greatly. A process is improved if a macro replaces a manual task. A system is improved if you halve the time to open a menu. Where there are multiple teams, dependencies and systems, the complexity escalates substantially. In the former cases, a focus on continuously driving small, incremental improvements can yield many small, localised wins. In the case of the latter, the mountain may seem so large that tackling it seems overwhelming and not worth starting. For all cases, a failure to overcome a business problem leads to inefficiency. It can also lead to worse employee and customer experiences.
Conquering inefficiency
We are proponents of improving as much as possible and we strive to continually improve. Sometimes, the gains are large. Other times, the sum of marginal gains adds up to a much larger gain over a period of time. Conquering inefficiency is always worth the effort as it makes the lives of staff better, as well as the satisfaction of customers. Whether you call them ‘time stealers’, sources of frustration or inefficiency, the result may be the hindrance of business growth. It saps productivity, reduces employee engagement and morale and distracts from the most important organisational goals.
Unfortunately, not everyone is up for the fight. People are a critical factor in spotting business problems and conquering inefficiency. Sometimes, people get on the bus and want to make things better for themselves and customers. Other times, they begrudge the extra work on a change, fear the change required or lack the skills to make it. In nearly all cases, the change is for the better, which makes tasks more manageable and reduces waste. The extra time can be put to better use in more rewarding work and better delivery for customers. So, let’s make those incremental gains. Let’s signpost where the issues are. Let’s dream of what great looks like and what is standing in our way. Removing business problems and conquering inefficiency are key to maintaining your competitiveness.
Challenges in conquering inefficiency
SMEs provide 60% of all UK employment and most staff are either busy or overworked. Furthermore, the Chancellor’s recent announcement about increased taxes on employment makes hiring less attractive. That gives very little capacity or bandwidth to conquer business problems – particularly, those gnarly, tricky issues that create inefficiency. After all, small-medium sized business owners don’t like to see money wasted, as is their prerogative. The result is that nearly everyone is close to, at or above their capacity. There is no ‘spare’ or stranded resource at a glance. It may surprise some to hear that large corporates and blue chips are often even tighter. This is due to strong governance and justification required for hiring and backfill of staff. Sometimes, departments, divisions or all areas of such large organisations have hiring freezes, further tying your hands.
Ultimately, there is also an elephant in the room. Is everyone working on the right things? Sometimes, people have a ‘Frankenstein’ job, assembled from bits of many previous jobs. Some elements should not sit with the role at all. Others are tasks that don’t add value. There may even be processes that have never been reviewed since day 1. This is before we think about structure, systems performance and design, dependencies and collaboration. As a result, people may be working on the wrong things. This ranges from tasks that should cease immediately to entire processes that need to be redeveloped involving investment and many stakeholders. You can easily see why it is easier to get on with it rather than fix it. Ultimately, this allows many small business problems to form a mountain rather than a molehill. How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.
Consign business problems to history
Think Beyond offers support from assurance and process improvement to programme management and organisational design. The most important part is to identify the need for support to help teams to help themselves. We know that the initial result may be a short-term increase in effort for long-term reward and improvement. Whatever the issue, we work with your team to conquer inefficiency and bury business problems. In conclusion, we help you become more efficient and deliver better employee and customer experience.
If you would like to know more, why not reach out to our friendly team in Cheshire.
Alternatively, why not drop us a short message or ask for a call back via our website.
Finally, here are two related blogs on how to plan after 2024 and how to deliver on your renewed energy.