In your professional services business, putting in place and using measures to make sure you’re going the right way at the right speed is crucial. The thing is, all your business is selling is its expertise. There’s no stock in the warehouse to keep an eye on, no daily till-take to cash up. You’ve got a finite number of people with skills to do the work each day. They’re making money working for clients wanting deliverables done to as a high quality standard as quickly as possible. Day-by-day, managing work to be done and people to do it can mean the difference between your business doing really well, or lurching from one urgent issue to the next.

Project Planning and Management

Every growing business gets to a stage where directors and managers get this feeling they’re ever so slightly ‘out of touch’. Things are too busy. It can get worse quite suddenly. Founders aren’t seeing the progress they’d hoped the business would have made across the range of jobs at hand. At the end of each week,  and at month end there is outstanding work that should have been completed.

Obtaining buy-in on expectations of work to be done by your staff is part of the recipe for success. It’s not Big Brother. It’s business management. Shying away from discussions on expectations will result in Parkinsons Law prevailing. That benefits nobody.

If you’re a time based billing professional like an architect, land surveyor, cost estimator or consulting engineer you have nothing to fear in changing your time and cost software.

For Planners, Surveyors, Consulting Engineers, Designers, Architects, Cost Estimators, PR Agencies and others who sell their time and expertise, it could be very simple to earn more fees without increasing costs. All it needs is business management.

When employee engagement is lacking, more often than not it is the work systems that are at fault, not the individuals. Do you need look at your businesses systems with fresh eyes?

In the second part of our ‘Business Growth in 2018’ blog, we ask you to consider the levels of employee engagement in your company. How do you measure the productivity and profitability of your workforce?

This is the first of two blogs where we look at how motivation must start from the top, and the impact this has on your employees …

For your company to achieve sustainable growth, workplace engagement is essential. However, according to Gallup, only 13% of employers worldwide are engaged at work. Only one in eight workers are psychologically committed to their jobs and are likely to make positive contributions to their organisations. Now, here in Australia and New Zealand we are doing ok. We have the second highest proportion of engaged workers globally at 24%. Yet that still leaves three quarters of our workforce who are not engaged or worse still, actively disengaged.

This is really going to affect your business potential in 2018.