Business Growth Tips: How To Make Your Business Function Effectively Without You

  Would your business run smoothly in your absence? Are your staff acquainted with the roles they should play when you are gone? If most business owners are to answer this question honestly, their reply would be ‘no’. Many SMEs are built around their founder’s ability to oversee employees and organizational structures from a close range. With the business owner out of the picture—even for a while –they may go into disarray.

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Inefficiency stemming from a top executive’s absence will eventually tell on the organization. The poor coordination that results from this may damage the company’s public image, produce unsatisfied customers, and lead to financial loss. How do you prevent these things from happening even when you’re not physically present at your workstation?

Ensuring That Your Business Runs Properly In Your Absence

Here are six things you can do to keep your enterprise going strong despite your absence.

Draw Up a Guideline 

You should have a guideline containing every important detail about each position and the roles that workers can and should play. Ideally, it will hold information about the various policies, rules, and regulations that pertain to your company. Staff can refer to it for directives if you’re away.

Train Your Staff

Your team should be prepared for the times you’ll be unavailable. Often, this means you have to train them for such situations. The training will put them through whatever extra roles they may have to take on, what they shouldn’t do, and who they would report to.

Decide What the Reporting Hierarchy Will Look Like

We already mentioned the need to report to persons higher up the organizational chain of command. This structure has to be decided upon before your leave. If the company’s administrative structure needs significant adjustment to function properly in your absence, be sure to lay out the adjustments early enough.

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Also, communicate the changes directly to your staff, so that there’s no uncertainty as to where the changes came from.

Leverage Automation

Your employees don’t have to wait until you’re back before reporting to you. Thanks to automated tools supported by digital technology and the cloud, you can communicate with them in real-time, and receive reports from them even when you’re on the go. Find out more about automating your business here.

Test Your Plan

So you’ve drawn up a plan for your business to operate smoothly when you’re not around. The next step will be to test it out. Like a drill simulates a disaster and the public’s response to it, your test has to mirror the business’s functioning when you’re unavailable. This helps you to assess your team’s readiness for the actual thing, and fix shortcomings that may exist.

Keep In Touch with Your Team

If you ran a business decades ago, you would have needed to take extra measures to keep your firm in shape in your absence. But thanks to technology, you can stay in touch with your team, and engage them in the work that they’re doing. Email, messaging tools, and video conference calling applications all make it fairly easy to connect with team members in real-time.

Final Words

You won’t always be around to supervise the work that goes on at your business. But you do have the tools at your disposal to enable your staff to operate at optimal levels without your physical presence. Take advantage of those tools, and built an enterprise that doesn’t merely depend on your personality to survive. Featured Image Source: Lead Grow Develop

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This article was first published on 24th May 2021

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