Can your business grow by 25% without increasing staff costs?

If your team could deliver what they deliver today in only three-quarters of the time, would your business be more profitable? Can your business grow by 25% without increasing staff costs? What if your sales team could win bigger deals, or your delivery team could negotiate better prices from your suppliers? What can you do to ensure your keeping talent in your business?

Skills, learning and development

Training people can be expensive but developing a skilled workforce can make a business more profitable. Ask yourself:

• Is every person in your team competent to deliver their role effectively? – Separate out the hard skills required every day (estimating, selling, installing, producing, servicing etc), and the soft skills needed to lead, manage others, delegate, communicate and motivate.
• Could further training in those areas help the business to be more profitable?
• Could work be done faster or more efficiently if people were better trained?
• If you trained someone else to do some of your day-to-day tasks, would it allow you to spend more time on the things that will add the most value to your business?

Training also gives your employees the opportunity to develop, grow, learn and be stretched. Which brings us on to…

Keeping star performers

Retaining staff is a challenge in small or mid-tier businesses that don’t have regular opportunities for promotion or sideways moves into new departments or international locations. But there are things you can do to keep brilliant people:

• Do the team feel well treated?
While pay, benefits, work-life balance and personal development opportunities are the obvious factors to consider, you might also want to ask whether they feel they are being listened to and treated fairly.
• Consider people as individuals, not a unit in your machine
Different employees will stay for quite different reasons depending on their personal situations and ambitions.
• Reward, celebrate and say thank you
It isn’t all about money, but regular salary benchmarking ensures you stay competitive and staff don’t get disgruntled. To turn pay into a real reward, look at what else you offer that your team value, how you say thank you, and how you celebrate really outstanding performance.

If you have the leadership, culture and skills training right, it is this full package that inspires the best staff to stay and keeping talent in the business.

If you need any help or advice on any of these areas please do drop us a line on [email protected].