Improving business performance is the top priority for organizations of any size. Whether you’re a small start-up or a well-established company, optimizing business performance leads to increased profitability, better productivity and improved customer satisfaction. But while it’s easy to set improving business performance as a goal, doing it is another question.
The first step to improve performance? Thoroughly understand your overall business needs, history and goals. Perform a SWOT analysis to get a handle on your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. From there set specific, measurable, achievable goals that make sense for your teams, whether it’s improving customer service, updating the employee experience or making your products and services better.
In this post, we’ll share 10 proven strategies to help improve business performance at your organization — from enabling employees to perform their individual best to organizational changes to set your company up for success.
10 strategies to improve business performance
Strategy 1: Increase employee productivity and engagement
Employees are the backbone of your organization, and empowering their productivity and engagement should be your top strategy for improving business performance. Increased productivity leads to more outputs and higher profits for your company, so it’s an obvious place to start. Prioritize finding ways to encourage teamwork and collaboration, automate repetitive tasks and manage time efficiently to increase productivity. Engaged employees are more committed, satisfied and productive, so increasing engagement can also help improve business performance. Studies show engaged employees increase profitability by 21%, but disengagement can cost companies billions of dollars every year.
Strategy 2: Implement effective communication
Encourage open and transparent communication across teams, departments and leadership. Meaning — find and use the communication channels most effective for your business, such as regular meetings, company-wide updates and the right tools for seamless collaboration. It’s important to balance open communication and communication to the point of distraction, like unnecessary meetings or constant interruptions through chats or phone calls. Set policies and guidelines to ensure effective communication and useful meetings to allow employees to stay in the loop while also being able to complete their daily tasks on time.
Strategy 3: Leverage technology for business growth
It’s important to use the right tools that lead to growth rather than the latest fads that may detract from your goals. Start by determining which existing technology is most helpful to your employees and where they may need new tools by tracking employee performance. ActivTrak provides granular data to show you which tools employees use to be most productive and where productivity is lagging. Track relevant employee engagement metrics with ActivTrak to see where workloads need balancing and which goals are met to determine which technology to invest in next, whether it’s automation, collaboration or data analytics.
Strategy 4: Focus on customer satisfaction
A satisfied customer will not just come back; they’ll also act as a brand advocate who can bring in new business. Get an understanding of your customers’ needs, preferences and pain points through market research, including how your customers feel about your brand and how competitors are doing. Empower your employees to deliver an exceptional customer service experience through the right tools and processes. Use business data like first reply time, ticket response and resolution time to go beyond the customer satisfaction scores (CSATs), and improve the customer experience proactively.
Strategy 5: Improve operational efficiency
Operational efficiency is a measure of an organization’s outputs and inputs. When optimized, it fuels businesses to produce the same or more high-quality outputs with the fewest amount of inputs. For example, consider a vehicle manufacturer that normally produces one automobile with a set number of resources. If a business optimized processes to now produce two automobiles with the same number of resources, this would be an example of greater operational efficiency. By improving operational efficiency, businesses improve performance by getting the most out of their resources.
Strategy 6: Invest in the employee experience
Investing in the employee experience can have a positive return on investment (ROI) for your business. Employees that have a positive experience at work are more productive, more motivated and more likely to stay at the company while providing better customer service and better quality output. These benefits help your company thrive, but how exactly do you invest in the employee experience?
Start by measuring your current experience using solutions like ActivTrak, which uses quantifiable data to assess engagement and burnout risk. From there, you focus on supporting employees who may feel burned out due to an unbalanced workload or being underutilized. In the meantime, you can invest in training programs for the rest of the team to enhance employees’ skills, knowledge and capabilities. Connect these programs to opportunities for professional development, so employees are motivated towards a career milestone. A highly skilled and motivated workforce drives performance growth for the business and is equally beneficial to the employees themselves.
Strategy 7: Mitigate potential risks
Risks are part of business, from technology issues like data breaches and hacking to public relations disasters or supply chain issues. Successfully navigating and mitigating risk keeps your organization safe from harm while keeping you a step ahead of customers. First, identify which potential risks are important for your organization, such as natural disasters, data handling, hacking or phishing and others. Ensure you have mitigation efforts in place, such as strong IT and data protection, employee policies and training. At the same time, be aware that trouble can arise for reasons you can’t control and develop strong contingency plans to navigate issues as they arise.
Strategy 8: Adopt data-driven decision making
Data is one of the most powerful tools modern businesses have to drive their performance. Knowing which data to use, how to interpret it and how to get it is the first step. Map out which data you have access to and what else you need to know and leverage the technology to collect and interpret the data. The right data allows you to identify growth opportunities, mitigate risks and make strategic choices. Employee productivity data is crucial for businesses, as it allows them to understand what factors help or hinder productivity among individual employees or entire teams.
When implementing policy adjustments, change management data can also help you understand the impact of the changes to determine if they’re having the desired effect. By tracking effects in real time, you can make on-the-fly adjustments rather than waiting until the end to see if something worked or not. Businesses looking to improve performance should adopt a data culture to encourage the collection and analysis of data to make informed decisions.
Strategy 9: Build strong business relationships
While competition is important, strong business relationships are also essential for growth and success. Cultivate partnerships with suppliers, distributors and stakeholders to foster mutually beneficial relationships built on trust and shared goals. Collaborating with trusted partners will expand your market reach and create new opportunities. It also provides you with insight into how to improve your operational efficiency by getting insight from outside sources.
Strategy 10: Set and track KPIs and business goals
Key performance indicators (KPIs) give you a way to measure your business performance and see when and how you’re hitting your goals. Productivity KPIs are a popular way for businesses to see how the entire organization performs in relation to benchmarks and goals. This includes individual productivity metrics for each employee, as well as teams and the organization as a whole. With set KPIs, the entire organization gets a granular view of where goals are being met and what needs more attention, whether that’s through support, training or other resources.
Improve business performance with ActivTrak
Gain insight and analytics to boost your business performance with ActivTrak. Use workforce analytics to spot trends in productivity, output and employee engagement to perfect your workflows, processes and policies. Give employees insight into their performance and empower managers to provide support where it’s necessary with data and insights instead of guesswork.
Schedule a demo to see how using ActivTrak can help you improve business performance through sustainable growth fueled by analytics.
