Business Consultants

Archive for the ‘Management’ Category

How would you like to hire someone that is more motivated and more qualified to do the work and costs you less than your average employee? No, I am not talking about hiring someone illegally. You can accomplish this simply by employing a telecommuter. Let’s take a look at 5 very good reasons, why it makes sense for you to consider telecommuting from an employer’s perspective.

1) Less Overhead
How much is all this office space, furniture, computer equipment along with your IT department to maintain them, utility bills etc. costing you? Telecommuters do not require any of the above, which will cut your overhead cost tremendously. Telecommuters use their own office, their own equipment from computers to paperclips; use their own power, phone and Internet connection. If their computer acts up, it’s up to them to get it up and running again.

2) Less Benefits To Pay
Most telecommuters are independent contractors. You do not have to provide for health care, workman’s compensation or paid vacation. Consider the tax benefits as well; there is no employer portion of federal and state tax to pay.

3) Hire Experts When Needed
Do you need someone to write the occasional press release and maybe come up with a revision to your brochure every once in a while? Instead of hiring someone fulltime as your marketing person, consider outsourcing the tasks to a freelance telecommuter. You will pay per project, or hire your freelancer for a few hours per month, instead of creating a marketing position. Freelancers give even small businesses the opportunity to hire an expert for almost any task.

4) On Demand Work
Do you expect a temporary increase in your workload, be it seasonal, or because you just landed a large project? Why not pick up a few telecommuters for the task instead of working with inexperienced temps, or hiring in-office personnel that you may not need three months down the road. Telecommuters combine the flexibility of temps with the on-the-job experience of permanent employees. You get the best of both worlds.

5) More Motivated Workers
Telecommuters have a very good reason why they want to work from home. Whether that reason is being able to stay home with the kids, a disability, or avoiding a long commute, being able to work from home makes them happy. As you well know, happy employees are more motivated, don’t count the minutes until they can leave the office and overall get more work done.

If you haven’t already done so, I encourage you to give telecommuter a try the next time you need a highly motivated, experienced worker, but aren’t in a position to create a permanent onsite position. Once you have experienced all the benefits a telecommuter brings to your organization, you may even consider converting even more positions to telecommuting.

When was the last time you had to deal with a difficult customer? It was probably and external customer but perhaps it was an internal customer, such as a member of your team, a colleague or even – your boss!

I’m sure that you always want to provide exceptional service to both your internal and external customers. However, in the real world, things go wrong and mistakes are made. These “customers” will often judge your level of service based on how you respond to a mistake. Do it well and they’ll probably forgive you and possibly even say positive things about your business or your abilities to other people.

The important thing to realise when dealing with an upset customer, be they internal or external, is that you must -deal with their feelings, then deal with their problem. Upset customers are liable to have strong feelings when you, your product or service lets them down and they’ll probably want to “dump” these feeling on you.

You don’t deal with their feelings by concentrating on solving the problem, it takes more. Here are 5 action ideas that deal with the customers’ human needs:

1 – Don’t let them get to you – Stay out of it emotionally and concentrate on listening non-defensively and actively. Customers may make disparaging and emotional remarks – don’t rise to the bait.

2 – Listen – listen – listen – Look and sound like your listening. The customer wants to know that you care and that you’re interested in their problem.

3 – Stop saying sorry – Sorry is an overused word, everyone says it when something goes wrong and it’s lost its value. How often have you heard – “Sorry ’bout that, give me the details and I’ll sort this out for you”. Far better to say “I apologise for ……” And if you really need to use the sorry word, make sure to include it as part of a full sentence. “I’m sorry you haven’t received that information as promised Mr Smith”. (It’s also good practise to use the customers name in a difficult situation).

4 – Empathise – Using empathy is an effective way to deal with the customers feelings. Empathy isn’t about agreement, only acceptance of what the customer is saying and feeling. Basically the message is – “I understand how you feel”. Obviously this has to be a genuine response, the customer will realise if you’re insincere and they’ll feel patronised. Examples of empathy responses would be – “I can understand that you’re angry”, or “I see what you mean”. Again, these responses need to be genuine.

5 – Build rapport – Sometimes it’s useful to add another phrase to the empathy response, including yourself in the picture. – “I can understand how you feel, I don’t like it either when I’m kept waiting”. This has the effect of getting on the customer’s side and builds rapport. Some customer service people get concerned with this response as they believe it’ll lead to – “Why don’t you do something about it then”. The majority of people won’t respond this way if they realise that you’re a reasonable and caring person. If they do, then continue empathising and tell the customer what you’ll do about the situation. “I’ll report this to my manager” or “I’ll do my best to ensure it doesn’t happen in the future”.

Make no mistake about it; customers, be they internal or external, are primarily driven by their emotions. It’s therefore important to use human responses in any interaction particularly when a customer is upset or angry. If customers like you and feel that you care, then they’re more likely to accept what you say and forgive your mistakes.

Hiring an employee can be a big step for many small business owners. It means the end of doing EVERYTHING yourself and passing off some of the work!

In order to make the experience rewarding for both you and your employees there are a few things that every boss and leader should do…

1) Reward people for a job well done.  Its frustrating working for someone who enjoys all the financial rewards of the efforts put forth by the entire team, especially if they don’t recognize what everyone has accomplished and contributed.

It doesn’t take much to acknowledge the effort of your staff. It makes a HUGE difference in the working atmosphere when you take a few moments to acknowledge your team. People like to know that they’ve done a good job.

2) Always provide a balance between positive and negative comments. Your job as a leader is to recognize the talents of those around you and feed them with the motivation and positive energy to take YOUR ideas to entirely new levels. Help them serve you better by building up their confidence… not tearing it down.

3) Step up and accept responsibility for your projects. At the end of the day if things don’t go according to plan, in my opinion, the responsibility falls onto the leader’s shoulders. Stand up and accept the responsibility should anything ever go wrong.

If your staff always bear the burden of projects gone bad, it will drag people down and destroy your working environment. Start contributing to the emotional bank account of those around you.

If you acknowledge the behavior you want to see more of, you’ll start seeing more of it. Be positive and accept some responsibility when things don’t go according to plan.

4) When you have good people it’s your responsibility as a leader to hold on to them. People with talent will take your company to entirely new levels but if they keep leaving, the growth of your company will be stinted.

People with skills know that they have options. Hanging the carrot of a potential big pay day will only work for a certain period of time. After a while it wears off and they start looking elsewhere. The last thing you want is for them to end up with your competition.

So the moral of the story is find good people, train them, treat them well, and your business will take off.