The importance of responsibility in your business

When running a developing SME business, responsibility is vital for maintaining the efficiency of your daily operations. Yet as your business grows, a simple string of tasks and requests can easily get blown into a vastly more complicated web of instructions. If not monitored carefully, you can and will lose track of what is happening inside your business. If not dealt with, sooner or later, your SME’s growth is going to come a grinding to halt. That is precisely why you need to establish who is going to be responsible for what and making them accountable.

The Importance of Responsibility

As an SME owner, you’re not running a playground, you’re running a business with fully grown adults. If you’re getting into situations where members of your staff are saying ‘he said this’ and ‘she did that’ you’re not holding on to your laurels. Responsibility is about accountability and ensuring that a said task is done on time. If they want to run around pointing fingers then it’s time for you to raise standards. At Rangewell, we’ve come up with our top tips for restoring control over your business.

1) Contracts

‘You are responsible for YOU’ is a lesson your employees must be taught. When hiring your staff, you need to make their responsibilities and areas of focus clear to them. This will help them understand what tasks they must complete, what alterations must be made and prevent them from wasting time. When things go wrong or don’t go exactly to how you plan, you can skip the who did what’s and go straight to the person responsible.

2) Team managers

As your workforce continues to grow larger and larger, maintaining total oversight can become too time-consuming and stressful. Eventually, you will be forced to hire team managers. These additions to your team will serve as an extension of your reach, perception and discipline.

Team managers will be able to maintain a constant watch over your employees under their authority. As such, a summary of the key tasks completed each day or serious concerns will be brought to your attention. However, you will still want to keep as close an eye as possible to your business’ goings on.

3) Morning meetings

Conducting meetings is an absolute must. As the business owner, this is an excellent time to get a face to face detailed summary of what your employees have completed, fell short of and what their key goals are. What you will also want to know is where they have upped their performance and whether or not they have any concerns. But beware of these most heinous of phrases: ‘I am planning on…’, ‘I intend to…’ and, ‘I hope to…’ These are not the correct answers to what has been done and are merely an attempt to divert your attention. Do not be distracted, bring the meeting back around to what has been done and where improvements can be made.

4) Daily updates

Daily update or log sheets are a great way of keeping track of what’s been happening in your business. At the end of each day, every one of your employees needs to complete this in detail, outlining everything that’s been completed, areas of concern and what their long-term goals are. It’s a great way of ensuring that employees don’t shirk their duties, maintain their productivity levels and have something to aim for. Over time you have a detailed log of everything that has been achieved and when. If an issue ever arises, you can go back and check on these to determine who was responsible for what.

5) Electronic Point Of Sale Software

Now, you’re probably wondering why on earth I’m discussing EPOS (Electronic Point of Sale) software in regards to enforcing control over your business? Applicable in many industries, EPOS is an excellent way of keeping track of stock levels, sales, customer engagements and more. However, they’re also a great way of monitoring your staff, in particular, those that work the tills.

Employees must sign their login details every time they begin working a till. As such, if an incident involving fraud or a mishandling of money occurs, you will be able to pinpoint exactly when it happened and who was responsible. Remind employees to keep their login details private and not to use tills or other terminals when another employee is still logged on.

6) Management software

As the owner of the business, your definitive goal should be on growth. Yet as it grows, keeping a constant watch can become harder and harder to achieve. This is precisely why you should consider the use of team management software. This is no substitute for having a hands-on approach in your business but can help keep documents stored in a tidy and well-organised manner, and flag potential issues. If you’re going to introduce daily updates, you’re going to have a lot of paperwork to sift through over time. Programs such as NetSuite, Khaoscontrol and Domo are just some of the management tools you can implement in and around your business.

Why Rangewell?

Our values are simple – We’re on your side. Our services are clear and transparent. We support a wide range of SME businesses of every shape and size, for finding every type of finance. Follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn for business tips and tricks, and feel free to call us on 0203 637 2340 if you’d like to chat about what we can do for you.