When trying to grow your business, it’s easy to focus on outside variables like customer retention, competition, and shifting market trends, but at the end of the day, the biggest barriers to ongoing business growth tend to be internal. But how can you identify faults in an otherwise well-oiled operation?
In the past, many companies hired consultants to gain an outsider perspective on day-to-day practices, but today you can maximize professional insights by turning to business intelligence (BI) tools. In particular, monitoring these two key variables can give your business the best chance to stop going in circles and push yourself and your employees to the next level.
Ramp Up Retention Rates
Every month in the United States, 3 million people quit their jobs. Many are new hires, but some are experienced employees looking for professional growth opportunities and these are the ones your company really needs to worry about because every time a seasoned staffer leaves, they take important information along with them. Increasing employee retention rates, then, should be a top priority for all businesses, and big data can help.
Whenever an employee leaves your company, no matter the circumstances, they need to take an exit survey. Exit surveys can reveal a lot about an individual employee’s experience – particularly things they wouldn’t have mentioned while still employed at your company. And as you bank exit interview data, you begin to get a sense of what you could have done differently to keep valuable staff on board and save your company money.
Assess Group Dynamics
Another major contributor to slow business growth is poor internal organization. So take a look around your office: who’s in charge? And why are they in charge? According to the strategic development experts at Ridgeline Partners, one of the five leading challenges to business growth is role and procedure confusion – in other words, there may not be any clear logic to the organization of direct reports, leading to confusion, conflict, and information siloing. But how can you tell if this sort of structural flaw is holding your business back?
Google may be able to help solve this problem. In an attempt to engineer the perfect team, the company spent two years studying 180 teams and measuring their success. Based on that study, Google found that the most successful teams all had certain traits in common, including dependability, clarity of roles, and psychological safety. While you may not be able to pin down these precise traits, you can use a test like StrengthsFinder, VIA Assessment, or Wiley’s DiSC to identify the best team composition. Team members should complement each other and balance each other’s skills if you want them to grow together.
Your employees are your greatest asset, and you shouldn’t let your business stagnate because you’re not fostering their talents and relationships. Instead, add some structure to the human element of your operations and take a data-driven approach to HR. It can put your business on the road to an exciting future.
