The Chartered Management Institute has published its five top tips for managers in small businesses.
The CMI top 5 are:
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Don’t hire in your own image
Hiring in your own image can be damaging to workplace culture. By hiring similar people, your company lacks the diversity and inclusion it needs to succeed in the business world. Diversity improves employee wellbeing and adds more revenue to the company.
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Set goals and focus efforts
Research by Mckinsey shows that out of companies who have effective performance management systems, 91% say that employees’ goals are linked to business priorities. Aligning personal and business objectives can make the results stronger and increase productivity. Goals should never be seen as stagnant, but should constantly be evolving. By setting goals concurrently, some things may slip through the cracks, or employees may attempt to achieve all goals in one go.
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Have an open door policy
An open door policy is positive in many ways for the workplace. It creates closer relationships and rapport with the staff members and presents a manager as being actively involved in the day to day activities in the office. As a result of this, managers are able to become a part of more informal discussions in the workplace. It makes communication between the manager and employees easier, resulting in increased accessibility to information as well as productivity.
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Culture is king
Cultural fit within a company can be a challenge to define. Essentially it describes the factors which affect the alignment between an employee and a company’s core values and culture. Cultural fit can include an individual’s behaviour, character, values, beliefs, attitudes, preferred work environment and management style. In a recent study by Totaljobs, over two thirds (67%) of employers felt that cultural fit was highly important and played a part in their recruitment process. “We can teach someone to do a job, we can’t teach someone to love the way we operate”, said the Founder of Kolbeco Lauren Kolbe.
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Conduct Team building exercises
Team building activities improve workplace projects that involve multiple people. The activities give people an understanding of everyone else’s strengths and weaknesses as well as finding out the areas that need personal work. This syncs the team’s aims and way of working, improving future projects.
You can find out more about the Chartered Management Institute here.
