by Staff Writer If you want your business to succeed, speed isn’t just important — it’s everything.
“Speed is fundamental,” says Heidi Pozzo, an executive coach for C-suite business leaders and author of Leading the High-Performing Company. “Speed is the difference in satisfying customer needs, it impacts the cost structure of the business, and it allows the company to be high-performing, not underperforming. It really is fundamental to how a business operates.” When businesses are slow to execute, the costs range from missed opportunities to grow market share to poor employee morale, Pozzo says. A culture of fast, smart execution is a sign of strong corporate health. How can your team pick up the pace? Here are eight questions to ask yourself to help speed up business execution within your organization. by Diana Ramos Whether you're renovating or adding to an existing location, or constructing an entirely new one, properly planning for a construction project is a tremendous undertaking. Even the most experienced program managers struggle with setting proper expectations for construction projects given the unforeseen hiccups that can occur.
There’s no way to be 100 percent prepared for the realities of a construction project. Contractors may encounter changes in site conditions and need to adjust plans, or there might be sudden shortages in important building materials. But that shouldn’t stop owners from making their plan as watertight as possible, and using a reliable software platform, such as Smartsheet, to help them execute. Ensure you and your contractors are hitting your targeted budget by dividing the process into these four key phases. by Renee Coulombe Business today is moving faster than ever, and leadership must accelerate work processes in order to stay competitive. In fact, a survey by Forbes found that 92% of executives believe that organizational agility is critical to business success.
But how do you speed up in the right way? Here are ten ways a work execution platform can help you move faster — so you can say yes to more ideas, more customers, and more revenue. by Stephen Danos How often do you make bad decisions? According to a McKinsey & Company survey, 72 percent of senior-level leaders believe that bad decisions are “about as frequent as good ones” — par for the course across their organization. As a company grows, apparently so does the potential cost of poor decision making. At the enterprise level, these undesired outcomes tend to stem from problems caused by increased organizational complexity, murky accountability, and an overabundance of data that cause decision makers to suffer from analysis paralysis.
Getting on the path to better decision making starts with recognizing and addressing these challenges — often with the help of the right enterprise-grade work-execution tool. by Staff Writer It’s estimated that the average adult makes 35,000 decisions a day. Though many of these may seem inconsequential, making the right call at work can be a fraught prospect. If you feel like you’re under pressure to make business decisions faster than ever before, you’re not alone. According to a Harvard Business Review report, 65 percent of managers say they face shrinking decision-making windows. And once a decision is made, three-quarters say they’re on the hook to achieve results in less time.
There’s good reason for businesses to push for speedy decision making. In a review of traits linked to organizational health, McKinsey researchers found that the majority of businesses that measured high for agility also ranked within the top quartile of overall business health. Agility is defined as speed of decision-making combined with stability, or having clear operating goals and metrics. So how can organizations make faster decisions more easily? Start by letting go of these three things that can get in the way of moving fast. by Katy Beloof on January 24, 2018 According to Gallup’s recent State of the Global Workplace report, 85% of employees are not engaged — or are actively disengaged — at work. The economic consequence of this translates to approximately $7 trillion in lost productivity.
Gallup defines this overwhelming majority of disengaged employees as those who consistently give you their time, but not their best efforts. These are employees who show up on time, put in their eight or nine hours, and head home, without contributing their best work or ideas. Finding and retaining top talent has been a concern for companies for quite some time. But keeping that talent engaged at work proves equally challenging — and failing to do so is costly. There may be an answer to this lost productivity in using automation to free up employee time to focus on more meaningful, business-critical work.
by Stephen Branstetter on February 21, 2018
Earlier this month, we revealed Smartsheet dashboards, an unprecedented bird's-eye view into your business's work in Smartsheet. With dashboards, you have a customizable, powerful tool that arms you with real-time data and information for making the best decisions. Let’s look at some best practices for getting started with dashboards so you can improve your work right away.
Preparing Your Information for Dashboards
Before you start building a dashboard, there are three factors you must determine.
by Stephen Danos on April 9, 2018
Teams tend to stick together, whether they work for a Fortune 100 company or a 50-person startup. After all, these colleagues often work toward similar goals and team boundaries are sometimes needed to keep things streamlined for meeting deadlines, and for nurturing camaraderie between teammates.
However, the “silo mentality” holds teams back in several ways. Team silos can result in a sense of tribalism and undermine the spirit of collaboration, running the risk of disrupting a company’s ability to innovate and stay aligned. Here are some of the ways silos can hurt your business and what you and your teams can do to avoid them.
by Stephen Danos on March 30, 2018
A culture of transparency, in which a company makes its strategic plans, playbooks, short-term and long-term goals, financial earnings, and important metrics available to all employees, increases visibility into department performance, promotes a healthier exchange of information, and can improve morale and engagement.
Transparent, thoughtful, and precise internal communications strategies provide employees with context for decision making at the executive level. This boosts internal enthusiasm, company pride, customer and product advocacy, and motivates internal teams to refine processes to make them more lean and scalable.
Cultivating a culture of transparency can be easier said than done, but the payoff is worth the investment. But, are you doing enough to promote internal transparency in your organization? Below are six ways to help you create a culture of transparency by providing employees with real-time visibility into relevant information. |
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