Over the past few years, we’ve seen how quickly and succinctly businesses can adapt to modern requirements to keep operations running smoothly. With a staggering 41% of employees in the UK considering leaving their jobs to find more gratifying work, there is a greater need for businesses to change to retain their workforce.
There are several ways you can continue engaging in practices that develop your business, but this must involve letting go of old-school management methods. Holding on to management styles that worked in the past won’t help your business become a champion of innovation in the future.
In this article, we’ll go through a few of the ways you can update your management habits in order to build a better future for your business.
“The Status Quo” – put learning at centre stage
You can never learn too much about your industry, no matter which one your business is part of. Assuming that the nature of the industry will stay the same forever and that you know all there is to know can hinder your development as a manager. Your employees and your business will suffer as a result.
Keeping up to date with trends and learning new skills within your industry is important as it helps you to maintain relevance along with the change. You can do this through internal seminars for your employees that impart some of your own knowledge, bringing in a third party to teach staff something new, or by engaging in one of many online courses that are available.
Investing time and money into learning, be it in-person or online, can show your team and your clients that you are dedicated to being proficient in your industry. Similarly, it will build trust from your employees as it’ll show that you want to continue developing them on an individual level and will help with employee retention as they’ll in turn feel motivated to continue growing.
It’ll also help your business in the long term. Keeping on top of developing trends can help develop new ideas rather than being held back by outdated industry ideas.
Flexibility
One of the main developments that has affected the working world positively has been hybrid working. Giving employees the option to work from home as well as in the office has revitalised employees’ happiness, with the CIPD finding that 56% of UK employees feel happier when they work from home.
Hybrid working should be an option for employees when possible. It’s shown to work and productivity levels can still be maintained, with research from Currys finding that 55% of people are more productive when working from home. This productivity could result in your employees feeling more motivated to continue working hard to grow your business.
Plenty of technology has been developed to make hybrid working more common among businesses, and it should be encouraged if it helps your employees. Communicating with them that you’re keeping their best interests in mind and not pushing for a mass return to the office builds trust in employees and encourage them to keep up productivity no matter where they’re working from.
Embrace the digital
On the topic of technology, embracing digital solutions throughout your business doesn’t just streamline practices that were difficult and arduous before introducing technology. Whether that’s calendar scheduling or payroll management, digitising these processes makes everything more efficient.
Technology is what makes options like hybrid working possible for employees. Implementing things like shared data storage through the cloud and remote video calling and chat solutions allows employees to take their work with them anywhere. This nomadic style of working can help your workforce to be inspired by their surroundings and can contribute to new ideas.
Making sure your managers are trained for the digital programs that you use is critical, as well as keeping an eye on developing tech that could help streamline practices even further. The digital world is constantly evolving so there’s no doubt there’ll be plenty of software under development that you can implement into your processes to continue to streamline for efficiency.
The way we work is constantly changing, so management styles need to change with it. Maintaining levels of knowledge around the evolving trends in your industry, as well as listening to what your employees want with hybrid working can help develop new ideas and grow your business. This can be done by undertaking online courses and digitising business practices to streamline them into systems that can be managed remotely.
Blog by Experts at Heriot-Watt University