Good business systems are all about having the time to spend on marketing, sales and delivering your products and services. It’s not about having good systems. Step four in our simple five step process to effective systems is about using your systems. Having a good car is all about travelling exactly where you choose to go, about using the car, not just owning it.
Your business is changing every minute of every day – it is either growing, or it is dying – but it is never static. So it makes sense that once you have defined a business process, people need to use it; it needs to be the way you do things and it needs to change as your business changes.
Let’s face facts, every business has systems, perhaps stuck in people’s heads or maybe in manuals that sit on the shelf. They’re just hard to use and don’t get updated. It’s a real challenge to keep most “systems” up to date and to make sure they’re being used properly all the time.
In step three, we looked at this issue and discussed how to build ownership and accountability, ensuring our new systems and processes will be “taken up” by our team.
So how do we keep our systems up to date? Simply, just as we have team reviews, we should also have system reviews. This ensures that our systems will change and grow with our business. Reviews also provide the opportunity for new team members to provide input and take ownership of systems, which in turn promotes their sense of personal accountability. The culture that this process creates is that of continuous improvement, with your team identifying changes and taking responsibility for updating systems accordingly.
Using systems also provides many other benefits including simplifying team induction. The effort to train new team members is greatly reduced, as the how and why of their role is fully documented, thus training takes the form of “guidance”. Team reviews and performance management also have much higher relevance for both the team member and management, because they’re based on something tangible.
Stay tuned for our next article in Systems Matters, to read the final simple step in having and using effective systems in your business.
Using systems also provides many other benefits including simplifying team induction. The effort to train new team members is greatly reduced, as the how and why of their role is fully documented, thus training takes the form of “guidance”.
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- XERO in a Day – how to use XERO day to day, and the fundamentals of bookkeeping.
- Managing Payroll Using XERO – how to set-up and process payroll, and meet regulatory reporting using XERO
- Smarter XERO – how to sort out issues, set-up and use Fixed Assets, Hubdoc, Budgets, Manual Journals and much more
- Introduction to XERO Projects – how to setup and effectively cost manage small projects
- Xero Hubdoc Training – take this half-day course to understand how to use Hubdoc for business expenses and integrating business transactions into Xero
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