In case you work for a company where most of the following is the case – I suggest you start thinking about switching your job – Nauman Jaffar
Thomas Michael recently posted 5 signs your company is in the dark ages, which made me think about signs that your company is headed for irrelevance. If any of these signs are true of your company, it’s time to smell the coffee and make some changes.
- You schedule more meetings than individual work time.
I recently worked with a major Fortune 500 client and they literally scheduled 40 hours of meetings in the first week! I thought it was a practical joke – sadly, it wasn’t.
If your staff comes in most days to a calendar full of meetings, you are inefficient as a company. People need individual time to get work done. Meetings should be scheduled only when necessary, should include as few people as possible,have ahard start and end timeanda tangible outcome.
Consider designating time during the workday as “uninterrupted individual time.” That not only means no meetings, but no cubicle visits either. Your employees will thank you and so will your productivity. - You don’t have a remote or teleworking policy.
If you still believe that people are less productive when working from home, you’re just plain wrong. Most of what we do in the office can be done on our computers at home or on the road. If you don’t trust your employees to do their work, you’ve got a bigger problem on your hands. Try a mixed policy where certain days are optional to work from home. Tell your employees you trust them to work just as hard at home and that you know they need uninterrupted work time (see #1). Putting faith in your employees in this way will pay back in leaps and bounds. - You still use email and the water cooler as your main collaboration tools.
Do you get 200 emails a day? How many just sit there taunting you because you never get through them? At the speed of business today, your employees need to be able to access real-time feedback and get answers to questions without waiting for an email to pop-up in their inbox.
Our team gets more done because we use tools such as Skype and Chatter to stay in constant contact, even when we’re geographically dispersed all over the US.
Collaborative tools should adapt to the way your teams naturally work. Interoffice web-conferencing, instant messaging, and project-specific collaboration tools will improve the productivity of your entire team. - Your website isn’t mobile and social-media friendly.
Everyone is surfing the web on phones and tablets these days, and the number is increasing every month. Case in point: open-rates on mobile devices for our monthly newsletter are around 40%. This number was 20% last year.
If you haven’t updated your company’s site in this decade, it’s time to make a change. Not only do potential clients make snap judgments about your business based on your web design and ease of access, but increasingly they do this on the go. If you visit your website on your phone and don’t like what you see, it’s time for a change. And while you’re at it, make sure your site and content can be shared easily via social media platforms (oh, and don’t let your web developer tell you that’s a big job…with tools like addthis.com this can be done in 10 minutes). - You still use money as the main motivator.
Despite what many people think, more money doesn’t necessarily equal harder or better workers. Making employees feel valued and appreciated and giving them meaningful work is actually a much bigger driver of success. Whether it’s a sincere “thank you”, celebrating a big sale with a pizza party, find creative ways to show how valuable your team members are to you. Or better yet, consider designing and implementing an ’employee happiness policy’ – something I am working on right now (and I’ll share details in a future post).
The main point I want to leave you with here is that we have more knowledge today than ever about how to create a positive and efficient workplace. Take advantage of that. Educate yourself beyond this blog post. Try some small changes and see how it goes. If you don’t, you may find your company on the decline faster than you think.
Have you recently made some of these changes in your office and want to share your story? Or do you have more items to add to the list? I’d love to hear from you in the comments.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/article/20141130142741-1318835-5-signs-your-company-is-doomed-for-irrelevance;
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