If there’s one thing businesses have learned to do better this year, it’s adapt. Businesses across the world have had to take an approach of immense agility in order to cope with the challenges brought by the global coronavirus pandemic. Companies across the globe have been faced with the difficulty of finding new ways to operate. Even without the destructive wrath of covid-19, adaptability is a crucial quality which any business needs to possess. While the most prominent challenge we face right now is covid, being flexible and adaptable will help you to make strides forward in your business consistently over time. Here are some tips to help in business adaptability:
Recognise achievements
Recognising the individual achievements of your employees is an intrinsic part of moving your business goals forward. Your employees drive everything within the organisation, meaning their wellbeing is a vital part of adapting.
With many priorities to juggle, recognising individual achievements can sometimes be pushed aside. Recognising its importance will help you to have better structures in place for motivating your employees. This can be through bonus schemes, an employee of the month, friendly competitions and other incentives. These different forms of recognition will not only help employees to feel more valued but will incentivise them to continue working hard.
A feeling of progress is one of the top motivating factors in driving success within a business. Small acts of recognition, therefore, are one of the best ways to engage teams. If people feel unappreciated, they will be far less motivated to continue putting in their best effort. While this concept may sound overly simplified, the power of positive reinforcement very much stands in a workplace environment. In addition to having different reward schemes in place, recognising your employees can be as simple as verbally acknowledging their efforts on a regular basis.
Offer opportunities to upskill
To further engage your employees, provide new training opportunities. Offering the chance to upskill demonstrates that you value employees’ career progression.
Often, people will not choose to engage with additional training in their spare time due to wanting a substantial work to life balance. A more realistic way to upskill employees is to offer them training that they can carry out during work hours.
There are several online training programmes available to help employees in upskilling. Consider some of your main goals and business needs and find training courses that are tailored to this. Whether it’s around improving communication skills, or knowledge of using new software, offering training courses will increase employee engagement with these areas.
Other opportunities to upskill include team-building days. This could be a one-off or a regular monthly activity that aims to address business objectives and work towards them collaboratively. Team-building offers everyone the chance to have their voice be heard while strengthening interpersonal relationships. It are essential tips that can help in business adaptability.
Utilise the best tech
In an age already dominated by technology, many still fear it. Innovating is not possible without utilising technology, but the good news is – it isn’t as overwhelming as some might think.
There are a number of tools out there which can help you with your business needs. Scheduling systems such as Trello or Asana are a great way to organise workloads more efficiently. Using a digital platform to schedule and oversee tasks means saving the manual work and potential admin tasks for your employees, letting the technology do the hard part.
Using Virtual Office Support is another great way to reduce the workload for your team members. Outsourcing particular business and admin tasks will mean more time for your employees to concentrate on their strengths. This also helps employees in terms of their personal progression, allowing them to communicate which areas of work they perhaps would rather focus on.
Stay aware of key trends
In order to remain agile, your business goals must be aligned with key trends. This means consistently researching your consumer needs and reviewing this in relation to your business strategy.
Staying in tune with trends means that your processes will always have a purpose behind them. Carrying out market research will help you to understand what needs to be done, and how. This doesn’t need to be a boring task; see it as an opportunity for growth!
Immersing everyone in the business strategy and goals means that adaptability will be occurring from the bottom-up. If it is only senior colleagues have an awareness of the strategy, only they will be acting upon it. Ensuring that everybody is involved and has a strong understanding of what the business objectives are means that everyone is working towards a clear and common goal.
Innovation is a Key Tip for Business Adaptability
Innovation isn’t so much a step-by-step guide as it is a mindset. To adapt your business, you must always be innovating. Innovation goes hand-in-hand with understanding significant trends and carrying out market research. Without these insights, there is nothing to drive innovation.
So, how do you take this to the next step? Being an innovative leader means having an open mind. Sometimes, the best ideas are not the most logical ones. Despite the uncertainty felt by many businesses in 2020, sometimes taking a risk is essential. This doesn’t mean making reckless choices, but simply thinking outside of the box.
Discussing ideas with different members within your organisation will provide diversity of thought. Research shows that greater diversity of thought increases levels of productivity and innovation. Integrating a variety of different perspectives within a business helps to represent both your employees and your different customers.
Often within the workplace, people steer towards those with similar outlooks to themselves. While this is not necessarily always a negative, it is essential to identify and actively work to seek different viewpoints. Those with different backgrounds and experiences may have a range of constructive ideas to drive innovation. Hope these tips are helpful for business adaptability.