Managing a business isn’t easy…
As a business owner or manager, everything seems to be on your shoulders. You worry about how your business would make it big, or if it would even survive considering all your competitive rivals within the industry.
You worry about everything because even the tiniest decision matters. One wrong move can ruin years of hard-earned customer loyalty and hard work, and one right thing can bring you one opportunity after the other.
Because of such complexities, one’s management style may make or break the business. In its entirety, every business management idea has to work — or else, the company suffers.
In this article, we will define what business management is and identify what business management ideas work in a modern-day competitive landscape.
Let’s get started.
What is good business management?
Business management refers to the planning, organizing, implementation, and analysis of a company’s day-to-day activities. It is a discipline that involves every skill required to run a business.
In essence, good business management deals with the correct application of methods and processes that result in revenue generation or growth.
It’s a way of handling business activities that delivers success, a way of making ends meet amidst challenges, and a way of dealing with situations that may affect the resources of the business.
Fundamentally, business management is the glue that keeps every business activity together, and the key that opens the door of desired outcomes.
This is the reason why business managers are found in every industry — to keep every inch of an operation up and running. Furthermore, business managers also handle the most valuable assets of an organization: time, people, and money.
Business Management Ideas That Work
Now that you understand the importance of business management, let’s take a look at some of today’s most utilized business management ideas and understand why companies apply them.
Involve Employees in the Operation
Innovative ideas are necessary for managing the business, so collecting a lot of them is essential. Here are two ways to achieve this:
- Fostering your employees’ growth
- Empowering your employees
1. Fostering employee growth
Promoting the growth of your employees can be done by simply asking the type of questions that spark their creativity and logic.
Not only will they be able to generate innovative ideas that could turn into the most successful products, solutions, and services, but by asking the right questions, you will also broaden their horizons by making them tap into their resourcefulness and creative thinking.
Not only will they be able to generate innovative ideas that could turn into the most successful products, solutions, and services, but by asking the right questions, you will also broaden their horizons by making them tap into their resourcefulness and creative thinking.
You can also set idea challenges within your employees that can encourage them to grow by collaborating with other departments. Upon doing this, make sure that you have clearly defined the goals, as well as the team’s key performance indicators.
2. Empowering Them
Employees feel empowered when they are valued. Once they understand that their insights and feedback are important to the organization, they start to feel that the company trusts their thought processes and judgment.
Making them feel that they are free to share their ideas opens the way for clear and enhanced communication between them and the management.
Another important thing to do is to accept their feedback. Do not dismiss their ideas altogether. Instead, entertain them and discuss their pros and cons with the rest of the team.
They will also feel empowered once their contributions are praised, recognized, rewarded, or being acted upon.
Simple praise, written and oral recognition, or even naming innovative projects after the employee who contributed it are more than enough to empower them.
Furthermore, if they were in collaboration with other people in taking innovation challenges, rewards can be given to the winning team. These rewards can be in the form of:
- Cash
- Days off
- Flexible hours for a day
- Paid meals
- Gift cards
- Company discounts
Involve Customers
Involving customers in your organization’s business management is not limited to the concept of “customers are always right”. Rather, it focuses on finding ways to engage customers via taking customer orientation a lot further than customer relationship management.
Involving customers means including customer inputs in some of the company’s product development processes — like marketing, sales, design, and customer service.
Popular ways of doing this usually involve competitions that require customer cooperation and engagement via:
- Videos that indicate their love and actual usage of the brand’s products and services
- Number of reactions and likes on social media posts involving the product or service
- Giving away free products or discounts in exchange for comments on and about one of the brand’s posts
Implement Digital Innovation
As the global digital population increases, businesses around the world are allocating much of their time and resources to building and increasing their online presence.
This puts digital innovation at the height of technological advancements applied in business strategies, making digital innovation an important element to integrate into the business.
Implementing digital innovation is vital in business management because it results in:
- Improved data and analytics that provides insights regarding customer preferences — information that when used properly leads to an increase in sales and total return on investment
- Improved customer experience through mobile apps and sites, increasing customer engagement
- Improved productivity via automation for increased productivity and efficiency
Continuous Innovation and Data Management
Constant innovation is indicative of great business management. Innovation makes use of the best ideas in creating not only remarkable products and services but also a way of working that delivers results.
Innovation aims to create added value for customers and employees by the development of breakthrough products, processes, propositions, and business models.
Why is innovation necessary in business management?
It is an investment that warrants resources, but only if proposed projects are successful and are actually bringing in profits, cutting costs, or adding value to your business in any way.
Businesses also need to innovate for the following reasons:
- Cut costs
- Achieve economic growth
- Refine current work
- Establish competitive advantage
- Discover opportunities
- Create trends
- Improve customer engagement
- Boost employee performance and satisfaction
In what ways can innovation be applied in business management?
Innovation can be applied in business management by carefully orchestrating goals and establishing execution roadmaps for innovations that are founded on the organization’s business strategies and research.
Incorporating innovation in business management can also come via processes that creatively improve various aspects of the business, or by applying processes that drive growth and increase the organization’s overall efficiency.
Innovation can also be injected into business management by implementing technologies into the operation’s processes and workflows. When innovation is correctly applied in business management, valuable insights are obtained through improved data analytics.
Plus, a better customer experience is conducted along with refined productivity and efficiency on your employees’ end.
More specifically:
Step 1: Discovery
A closer inspection of both the internal and external sides of innovation must be conducted to discover the best innovation strategy to integrate with business management.
You can begin by researching the company’s present strategic plans and identifying what changes are necessary to implement in order for the plan to fit the market better.
For this, a market analysis, as well as a thorough study of trends and developments involving customer, partner, and employee outputs are recommended.
The data gathered in this stage can be utilized to apply SWOT, scorecards, and other models to further define the direction of the strategy.
Step 2: Development
This step involves establishing the foundation of the innovation strategy from the information gathered on the preliminary research and conclusion in the first step.
Strategy building blocks are created, including core values, objectives, vision, mission, and strategy statements.
This step also includes identifying pivotal target groups and establishing the foundation of the innovation engine so the process is optimized in the best way possible.
Step 3: Solidifying Plans
Now that the imperative parts are done, it’s time to solidify the plans for the innovation strategy. To ease this process, using mind-mapping software to create a roadmap that contains the strategy’s goals is highly recommended.
Moreover, key performance indicators must be established to evaluate the success of the innovation strategy, along with the responsibilities of every department in the company to ensure the success of the strategy’s implementation phase.
A regular meeting schedule must also be planned not only to update stakeholders but also to evaluate and understand what necessary adjustments have to be performed to deliver an optimal outcome.
Step 4: Launch
Launching the strategy must be done in a very enthusiastic manner. Everyone must be aware of the goals that the strategy aims to achieve over time, and that everyone has a part in seeing it through.
Step 5: Execution
The details regarding the execution of innovation strategies within the year must be strictly followed. Organizations must not deviate from it unless improvements are observed.
Keep everyone on board and prioritize the right things by:
- Giving a detailed perspective into the figures
- Instituting a regular set of consultation
- Establishing clear communication with everyone in the team
- Leading through exemplary behavior
Make Use of Company Data
Now that innovation strategies have been incorporated with business management, it’s time to measure their progress by using dashboards.
Based on the KPIs established in the prior methods of implementing innovation in business management, measure the amount of value that they create for the company.
Members of the organization must be able to single out every piece of information that they need to understand relevant data, which must reflect progress in terms of the:
- Business management’s processes and workflows
- Employee engagement
- The overall speed of performance
- Productivity levels
- Level of sales and revenue
Make Use of Market Data
Current trends must be studied, and every course of action taken by rival companies must be taken into consideration when planning the next steps that the organization must take to beat out other brands existing in the market.
Slowly incorporate these ideas into your business management style and watch how it takes a definite form in achieving organizational goals and success. Get more customers, run your business effectively, and take the lead in bringing in everything that works for the business.
Next steps: Organizations that implement innovation in business management utilize innovation platforms like Accept Mission to complete every step of the innovation process.
With a good innovation tool, you can ideate, select the best ideas, and manage projects without ever leaving the platform.
Learn more about what Accept Mission has to offer by going on a feature tour.
