With holiday season fully upon us, many will be taking to the beaches, and enjoying the pleasures of a swim in the sea. However, sadly for some, what starts as a pleasurable dip, can end up being a traumatic event, as the dangers of ocean currents take a hold…
Rip currents are present on many beaches all around the world, and unless you are au-fait with how to identify them, and how to respond should you get caught in one, the consequences can be deadly. Thankfully the incident rate is very low, with the USA, for example, having 100 deaths last year.
The simple answer to surviving in a rip tide, is don’t fight it. Rip tides don’t pull you down, they pull you away from the shore. The natural reaction is to fight this and try and swim back to shore, which is why most deaths from rip tides are attributed to exhaustion, followed by drowning. The graphic in this article clearly explains what you should do…
So why I am writing this article in my blog you may ask? Well, firstly, if anyone reads this and it saves a life, it would be possibly the most important thing I have ever done, but secondly, because I want you to reflect on where you are with your business…are you trying to swim against the tide and keep finding yourself struggling for air?
The most obvious example for many companies right now is the challenge of hiring. In all the networking and business events that I have been to lately, I am constantly hearing business leaders talking about the hiring challenge, and recruitment companies talking about how hard it is to fill vacancies. If this isn’t one of the best examples of ‘rearranging the deckchairs on the titanic’, I don’t know what is. The pool of people with a specific skill set isn’t going to get bigger – in the short term (unless the government suddenly releases non UK employees onto the market – which is very unlikely, and won’t help UK productivity in the longer term), so my guidance to all companies in this situation is STOP! Don’t swim against the tide, stop thinking linearly, and work smarter.
I haven’t been into in a single business where productivity couldn’t be improved by at least 10-20% – and for most companies, that’s more than enough to cover the recruitment shortages (I accept there are some specific sectors such as farming where it is more challenging). Instead of trying to hire people that don’t exist (or you have to poach from somewhere else, which sets off a vicious cycle) invest in your own people and processes, make your business more competitive, make your people move valuable and rewarded, work less frustrating and resolve all your issues in one suite of activities.
A business that operates well, and gets it right first time every time is rewarding, efficient and attracts and retains good people…
- If your staff are leaving,
- If you’re worried about your profit margin or overhead burden,
- If your business grew the top line but not the bottom,
- If you work off spreadsheets all the time…
… then these are the alarm bells that are telling you that you need to be looking at how your business operates, instead of wasting time and money trying to hire new staff.
Yes, I appreciate how to do that may appear challenging, impossible even, but that’s why you engage someone like myself, to help you achieve that.
To put this in perspective, I recently undertook a process review with a local company that wanted me to give feedback on how well they were operating. Working with their team onsite, we reviewed all the processes that they used and came up with proposals for improving. The result of this exercise was a massive reduction of 55% of process steps.
Not only were process steps removed, making everyone more efficient, but we improved the quality and robustness of all the processes, improved data collection and reporting, thereby giving better business MI (Management Information), and also eliminated lots of spreadsheets and other high risk ‘outside system’ tools by pulling all the processes back into their ERP (as the one source of truth). The transformation is phenomenal, and robust. In doing so they have also reduced the staff overhead by 10% with the top line growing by 20 % and the net margin now improving as we move through the second half of the year.
Whilst this may sound too good to be true, it’s not. This kind of transformation may sound unrealistic, or you may have 20 reasons why your sector/business is different/more challenging….it’s not. From HR call centres to prisoner transport, from manufacturing to facilities management, working with the relevant teams, I have made this level of change, and more, in them all.