Identifying the Best Candidate
Choosing one candidate for a position out of five can be overwhelming, let alone fifty. Where does an employer begin to differentiate?
Your Business Success is in the Hands of Your Employees
Getting the right people on the job is mission critical for all companies. Employees, whether staff or management, can make or break an organization.
Goal Setting: Find the ROI – Measure Your Goals
By Valerie G. Cardenas “You can’t manage it if you can’t measure it.” – Paul J. Meyer Have you heard this business quotation before? It’s one of my favorites because it’s absolutely true. Unless you have a strategy for measuring your goals, you have no way of keeping your business on track and no way of knowing when you’ve achieved success. Good management of goals begins with setting measurable goals. (You may recall my reference to SMART goals in previous blogs – Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, Tangible goals.) If you’ve set measurable goals, then you’ve asked some basic questions, such as: How much? How many? By when? Now you’re ready to measure. Choose Measurements that Can be Managed for ROI Every business is different, so measurement strategies and types vary. But here are a few standards to get you thinking about measuring your business goals and determining your Return on Investment (ROI): General Business Measurements Dollars per contracts signed Number of call-backs per 100 jobs Increased your profit by [insert your goal percentage here] Sales Measurements New accounts as a percentage of total accounts Number of new accounts per day Percentage of referral business to your total business Ask yourself: How can you track your success? Or, what does success look like to you? Remember the quote we started with: You can’t manage it if you can’t measure it. Set up Dynamic, Motivational Measurements of Achievement Once you establish measurements, then share them and your checkpoints reached – even if the sharing is just with yourself. We humans need to celebrate our achievements! Create the visual that works for you. It might be a chart that shows your upward progress, a graph that compares, counts, or illustrates checkpoints reached. It might be pins on a map, numbers on a spreadsheet,…
Realizing the Personal Aspect of All Productivity
Recently in one of my business coaching workshops, a client hit the nail right on the head when it comes to company productivity. “Let me see if I’ve got this right,” he said, “What you’re saying is that company productivity is really all about personal productivity. It’s all about us.” You can imagine my response: “Excellent,” I said. “Gold Stars.” All productivity, whether your company is a small firm or a global corporation, derives from the personal. And what does that mean to you, the leader or owner of a company? It means that your company’s productivity begins (or ends) with your personal leadership and productivity. You get your team to be more productive by setting an example of personal productivity. Leadership Matters in Productivity Productivity starts at the top, in your office. Think of who has the most invested in your company or department. I’d wager that that person is you. If you own the business, it’s your money on the line. If you’re the managing executive of a department, it’s your career and reputation on the line. Your investment in productivity is huge. Now, consider the essential nature of productivity. If I’m on your sales force, I can bring in all the work in the world, but if it can’t be done within budget and without cost overruns or rework or, at worst, orders cannot even be filled, then we do not get the net result we’re looking for. In fact, we do our business more harm than good when we over-sell and under-deliver; i.e., when productivity cannot meet needs. This is no small order, either, and is especially challenging now that many workforces have been reduced and everyone has to be more productive without having a nervous breakdown. Productivity can mean the difference between survival or not…
