On Internet Business

Strikes and business

Posted by Michael under customer service

As Britain copes with the effects of the public sector strike called by four unions, the Chief Executive of the London Chamber of Commerce has gone on record, saying the strikes will harm business.

Around 750,000 public sector workers are on strike, and the range of interruption to business—from long delays at airports, to the need for parents to organise childcare or remain home with children whose schools are closed—is likely to have both immediate and more long term effects, possibly knocking on as far as the Olympics in 2012.

The London Chamber of Commerce predicts ‘… a nightmare for businesses as staff absence and losses in productivity will be inevitable.’

The Wall St Journal highlights the risk of harm to the UK’s inward investment, in a week when the Chinese Premier has been making happy noises about China investing more in the country, and points out that the dispute is likely also to divide the public.

For businesses, a ‘national’ strike can be a challenging scenario, but the smartest organisations are using the opportunity to re-invest or re-invent forms of work so that they can actually innovate around potential future scenarios.

Several of the largest UK firms have offered parents a ‘work from home’ day where they can focus on their annual appraisal or complete training modules and one of the biggest accounting and consultancy companies is urging both staff and clients to ‘Skype it in’, providing teleconferencing and other facilities so that business can continue as usual. It’s more difficult for freight firms and other large physical plant companies to find ways to get around such issues, but there may be opportunities for every kind of business to seek out savings or new technologies that will help them address a period of unrest.

Closed sign courtesy of charenton_

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Six ways to benefit from the Bribery Act

Posted by Michael under Business Growth, Entrepreneur Resources, Leadership

From next month, British-based firms of every size will be facing the biggest shake-up in UK bribery law for over a century.

Whether you’re an SME or already a multinational, there are new forms of risk to assess and build into your business strategy. The most notable is a crime labelled ‘failure to prevent bribery’ which puts the onus on the business to prove that it has assessed the risk and implemented ‘adequate procedures’ to stop bribery being used within the company or by third parties acting on the company’s behalf. This crime leaves company open to fines that do not have a financial ceiling and also to the possibility of being barred from seeking government contracts.

While bribery may seem a remote issue to many firms, it’s important to recognise that the shape of the new legislation makes it a management concern and failure to implement good structures could lead to investigation and long-drawn-out interactions with the Serious Fraud Office or the Ministry of Justice. It’s also crucial to recognise that investigations are increasingly driven across national boundaries so a concern may be raised elsewhere in the world that is then acted on by a UK agency.

Dealing with the Bribery Act

Creating the right processes begins with business governance, and involves setting in place controls, ensuring there is a business culture of integrity and ensuring that individuals at the all levels in the organisation have been given training in values and behaviours that make the company averse to the risk of bribery.

1.    Start with a risk identification programme to find the areas of greatest risk
2.    Make sure you have a policy that is explicitly anit-bribery and that it is driven down from the top of the organisation to the bottom as part of induction, annual review and continuing professional development
3.    Create an anti-bribery champion at senior level who is able to challenge all levels of the organisation on their actions and their values. Resource this person effectively to carry out their role and create an annual reporting structure that is transparent to all areas of the business. A company intranet is a good way to do this.
4.    Check that existing contracts with consultants, directors and employees as well as outsourced areas all contain a clause prohibiting any form of bribery.
5.    Ensure HR can carry out good due diligence on new employees and that an effective form of due diligence is in place for partnerships, joint ventures and even funding sources.
6.    Give whistleblowers respect, anonymity and the chance to report concerns safely. Act on such concerns swiftly and with due concern for the anonymity of the person who raises them. Document the company’s actions in responding to concerns.

While such legislation can seem like a brake on business success, a good corporate strategy can use this kind of review to drive better understanding of values through the company, making integrity an aspiration, not a nuisance.

Image courtesy of images_of_money

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When employees lie

Posted by Michael under Uncategorized

20% of people who responded to a survey from Inventium admitted to lying about their age and qualifications or their previous jobs and why they left them. Some even presented supporting documents that that didn’t belong to them. It’s clearly a commonplace scenario as nearly 70% of those surveyed admitted they had lied, or been tempted to lie, on an application form or in an interview.

And it seems that people in creative industries such as media and design are the most creative with the truth: 28% claim to have used material in their portfolios that wasn’t their own work.

For employers this is a major problem: the cost of recruitment and induction for new people is high – if there’s a prevalent tendency to lie about skills, capacities and experience, that already high cost ends up being doubled as the chosen candidate turns out not to be suitable or unable to cope with the role they’ve lied to get.

GH Smart’s Who: The A Method for Hiring is a way of dealing with this issue. It offers a structured framework within which recruitment works to find and keep the best staff for your organisation. It begins with making a scorecard that outlines key objectives and explains the job.  Then a list of key competencies is created – this is the skill-set necessary for an candidate to be good (not just able but good) at the job. Using these two, a brief screening interview is undertaken by telephone asking four key questions:

1.    What are your career goals?
2.    What are you good at professionally?
3.    What are you not good at or not interested in doing?
4.    Who were your last five bosses and how will they each rate your performance on a 1-10 scale when we talk to them?

Those who pass the call get a face-to-face interview with questioning that unpicks areas of weakness eg asking about high and low points at school and college and in last five jobs or roles, talking about previous bosses and how they would assess the candidate and exploring goals and aims. Questions starting with ‘what’, ‘how’ and ‘tell me more’ all open up areas for deep exploration. The responses can then be checked with former employers for reliability of response with demonstrates both integrity and self-awareness if the matches are good and areas of major concern if the match is bad.

Interview image courtesy of voguemarie2010

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Smart businesses have savvy social media…

Posted by Michael under customer service, Social Media

… but sometimes even the people who are supposed to know their stuff get it badly wrong. In the small but highly charged world of computer games, a bad review can be a substantial belly blow, but when a PR agency hit back, the story went viral.  The game was Duke Nukem Forever and the agency was the Redner Group, which responded to negative comments on the game previews by posting a tweet saying “too many went too far with their reviews. We r reviewing who gets games next time and who doesn’t based on today’s venom.”

While the tweet was swiftly removed, so was the game designer’s confidence in their PR choices. Redner Group no longer have a contract with the game company and as that was their biggest client, their future is looking less than promising.

The phrase coined to label this kind of behaviour is ‘social over-sharing’ – it means that a business or individual has lost sight of the boundaries that separate personal emoting and business communication and in the case of James Redner of Redner Group who posted the infamous tweet, he’s on the record as saying that he ‘felt like a father’ about the game and his overreaction was as a result of that emotional identification.

Dealing well with negative social media commentary

Social media is a two-way track. It’s more like a conversation than an ‘exercise’ so (a) you can’t control what comes back at you and (b) everything you say may be overheard by other people who respond immediately – be prepared for that! In the case of Duke Nukem Forever, journalists jumped all over the tweet as it looked to them like blacklisting. That may not have been Redner’s intention but when ‘conversation’ is ‘overheard’ there may be a wide range of interpretations that the business needs to recognise and deal with.

Define the problem. If you’ve got any constructive criticism at all, in amongst the negative stuff, say thank you. The revealing of genuine problems should always be something a business is grateful for. If you think the person has gone over the top, but there is some truth in their negative comment, try reframing the facts in more pleasant words and then respond to your reframed version. Example – ‘this product stinks: it took me four tries to put the thing together and the instructions are useless, too small and badly translated.’ Reframe – the product was more difficult to assemble than expected and the instructions are not as helpful as they could be. Response – thank you for pointing out that the instructions could be clearer: we will work on that. We’d like to know if you think better instructions would have made the assembly easier?

Trolling and Trashing. Trolling is the behaviour of online personalities who simply like to cause conflict. Trashing is where a person comments on your product negatively in order to promote a rival service or product. The only way to deal with trollers and trashers is to ignore their comments and remove whatever you can of their presence. The good news is that even determined trashers have a short attention span if you are on their case and don’t respond to them. Be sure they are a trasher though – one way to find out is to copy and paste their comments into a search engine: if you get identical hits appearing you know you have a trasher on your hands. Trolls are clever, manipulative and determined, but in social media terms, poorly tolerated so often you’ll find social media will patrol its own trolls and you just need to be on your guard against giving them the oxygen of publicity.

Troll image by meshmar2

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The environmental cost of the recession

Posted by Michael under Business Growth

Back in 2009, Europe-wide research showed that the recession had taken a chunk out of the ethical and ‘green’ retailing market with one in five shoppers claiming that their new financial position stopped them being able to environmental or ethical issues when making purchases. Interestingly, the focus on ‘green living’ was still increasing, with over 90% of those who responded saying they had taken up at least one ‘green’ behaviour in the previous 12 months – but ‘green’ shopping had fallen to a low place on their priority list.

Consumers cut back

12% of people had given up buying an environmentally friendly product that they used to purchase because they could no longer afford to pay the premium for it but 20% were still buying organic food even though they were trying to cut back on their food expenditure.

Eurostar rolls back

Against this background, Eurostar has announced that it will no longer be offering carbon offset passenger journeys – preferring to set the target of cutting emissions across its business by a quarter over the next five years. The company says that customers found the concept hazy and ‘didn’t get it’. While Eurostar claims that a Eurostar journey produces around a tenth of the CO2 of an equivalent flight between London and Paris or Brussels, it is struggling to roll out the carbon offset concept against the fierce price competition being waged by budget airlines which makes cheap flights an attractive option even for business travellers who find the free-for-all nature of getting a seat, food and access to toilets to be a strain on peak performance professionally.

High Streets failing

And the recent research by Colliers International showing that nearly 25% of town high streets are ‘failing’ is also leading to an environmental issue. The smaller, often less well-resourced businesses that take short term leases and sell cut-price or discontinued or bankrupt stock have a higher environmental footprint, less well-developed sustainability and environmental policies. They may even be selling products that lack proper supply chain audits: either imports from areas with lower human rights and environmental standards than usually seen on the high street or products considered below standard by the manufacturer but acquired for resale by ‘discount’ stores.

Finding new markets

It all adds up to an environmental bludgeoning which could lead to a backlash by consumers when the recession is over. But major retailers like Marks & Spencer are riding the storm by choosing to give less prominence to their environmental strategies in mass media PR while maintaining their focus by renaming such activities ‘efficiency savings’ and looking at new markets, like India, where the company has just opened a store in New Delhi.

Empty shop courtesy of egfocus

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UK businesses face employment and finance hurdles

Posted by Michael under Business Growth, Entrepreneur Resources, Leadership

This month has revealed the CBI’s newest analysis of the UK labour market, which claims to expose long-established structural problems which can inhibit business success and won’t be solved simply by overcoming the recession. The current unemployment figures 2.46 million will continue to rise through the year, according to the CBI, with a high of 2.6 million. The unemployment rate will then begin to fall, slowly through 2012. The bad news is that within that national position there are regions of long-term, entrenched unemployment and an overall skills shortage in certain key business skills.

The report suggests that these divisions in skill and supply, or from the social perspective, in quality and quantity of opportunity, will actually deepen as the recession fades. A key factor for those planning reform and growth is that the businesses sectors with greatest employment growth between 2004 and 2007 were also the ones with the steepest employment decline after 2008, which suggests a boom and bust phenomenon that could happen again unless some form of structural improvement is made.

NESTA sees trouble ahead

And in March a National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA) report found that high-growth businesses in the UK had been more resilient than their slower-growing counterparts since 2008, meaning they have been a key driver of recovery. High-growth businesses are defined as those designed to achieve high growth and rapid profit increases (usually around 50% growth per annum) often meeting these targets with innovative product development and promotional strategies and with a pool of investors providing working capital and active oversight.

By this definition a mere 6% of UK businesses are classed as high-growth, but they created over half of all new jobs since 2007 by outperforming other forms of business enterprise, by having robust systems and products, and—through the injection of investor capital—avoiding the cash-flow problems that lead slower businesses into insolvency.  However, the drop in risk capital funding in the UK since 2008 is starting to hit these businesses too, because traditional lending structures view them as higher credit risks, often because they haven’t been around long enough to have the kind of track record that commercial financing houses see as conferring stability.

Better education a solution

Both reports focus on the need to build a skilled and creative workforce to support business growth and on improving links between businesses and educators to meet the skills gaps that have been identified.

Hiring notice by srqpix

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Family Business – the future of SMEs?

Posted by Michael under Business Growth, Entrepreneur Resources, Leadership

PricewaterhouseCoopers have just published a report that suggests over 20% of family businesses in the SME category are expecting to have new owners in the next five years – but only 7% of them expect the business to pass from one family member to another. More than 1600 small businesses in 35 countries took part in the survey.

Family businesses fail to plan and plan to fail

Future-shock can be a real issue for SMEs and demonstrates a lack of strategic planning. But by breaking down the terms we use when describing an SME, there’s a chance for small businesses to lever more finance, plan for the future and even move from small to medium by redefining what ‘family’ is.

First the bad news: many SMEs still don’t understand, or plan for, their exposure to
Capital Gains and Inheritance tax. This can cause conflict at the crux point of deciding the future direction of a small business, or add to pain and grief at a time when an SME loses its founder to death or illness. There’s also an inherent problem of managing the balance between family and firm when employing relatives in a small enterprise because if they don’t perform well, it’s difficult (but not impossible) to work within the formal business structures when evaluating their performance and working with them to improve their output.

Family firms can outperform others

On the other hand there are plus points. You can get great people to work for you, often for less or no money, because family members are willing to support and invest in a family firm – and if you bring your home-grown talent with you, you’ve got less competition out there!

On the other hand, you need to work harder to get finance because funders look much more closely at family firms, seeking exactly the kind of weakness in future planning, strategy and talent development mentioned above. One way to address this is to take your business to an international level as soon as possible – showing that you can work across national boundaries is a great way to demonstrate that you aren’t a ‘cottage industry’.

Redefine family to boost business success

Think about how you define family – what about offering a loyalty bonus to staff who’ve been with you for a period of time? If you leverage them into an equity share, involve them in ‘family’ events, make sure their birthdays and family events are as important to the company as your own: you’ve started to build an extended family where intimate confidence in and knowledge of the lives of your team can extend past blood relationships to build the kind of partnership that ensure you keep your best people and establish a small empire through talent, not kinship. That’s attractive to any funder and if those ‘family’ members decide to leave, and you can support them in establishing a subsidiary or complementary organisation, you’re on your way to hot-housing a cluster of business excellence that supports the growth of your SME without cutting into your market share.

Market stall child by Ivan Mlinaric

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Creating the right climate: social media and employees

Posted by Michael under Business Growth, Social Media

We’ve all seen the stories: forwarded work-based emails that travel the globe carrying salacious details of peoples’ personal lives, or the employees who diss their employers on their last day in the job, dishing the dirt on the company they’ve worked for or their immediate boss’s bad habits.

Then there are the ‘anonymous public announcements’ via blog – the most recent of which purported to show how young Ronan Parke was ‘groomed’ by Simon Cowell’s production company and that the show was ‘fixed’ – this claim has been passed to the police by Cowell as a malicious communication. Then there are the several recent cases in the USA where employees have had their employment contracts terminated for social media statements that breached their employer’s social media or other policies. In one an employee said on facebook that his company was full of thieves and idiots and a couple of days later named his company and his boss. In another case, an employee said he was being supervised by a ‘17’ which is USA Human Resources code for a psychiatric patient.

The outcomes of these cases haven’t been simple. While none of the employees who were dismissed have won an unfair dismissal case, several employers have been castigated over their overly broad policies and required to revise their social media and other policies to ensure that they could not be used to limit an employee from speaking about matters internal to the company but still part of the employee’s right to free speech.

Social media such as facebook and blogs, but increasingly also twitter, are proving a minefield for employers. It’s important to have a coherent policy that allows employees to understand what is acceptable communication about, and originating from, the workplace. But it’s almost impossible to patrol social media and difficult to judge when lines are crossed – in some companies saying you work for the biggest lunatic in the world is entirely appropriate (and may even be appreciated in some of the zanier industries like gaming, music and the arts) but in others is totally unacceptable.

Creating a solid social media policy

•    Network with similar organisations – having an industry or sector based policy or at least widely agreed lines is useful because with staff churn it’s a time and trouble-saving way of ensuring that people moving from one company to another have a rough idea what is okay and what isn’t.
•    Review regularly – this area moves fast and a policy on social media probably needs reviewing every six months.
•    Involve unions representatives if possible – several of the contested US cases have involved the failure to allow employees to discuss matters like pay and working conditions which are their right to reveal under terms like collective bargaining. Working with unions or other trade groups when creating policy can prevent unfair dismissal cases later on.
•    Be flexible – while there are always areas where immediate dismissal is almost always necessary: racial and sexual harassment etc, having a range of sanctions to apply can help a company feel its way through early examples of social media misuse before it ends up at an employment tribunal.

Tweeting courtesy of topgold

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Mission Creep – a business problem?

Posted by Michael under Business Growth, Entrepreneur Resources, Leadership

Coined in 1993, during the UN Peacekeeping Mission as part of the international response to the Somali civil war, the term mission creep has entered daily life. Bosnia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya – all demonstrate examples of mission creep, which is often defined as the expansion of a project or mission beyond its original goals, often after initial successes and leading success breeding more ambitious activity until a final, often catastrophic, failure occurs.

And that could be a definition of many businesses that fail, or wobble on the edge of failure, right now. It’s easy to slide into unexpected areas of operation because they are popular with customers or even with staff, and popularity can be a driver of growth: but it shouldn’t be the only one.

Many non-profit organisations have learned to control ‘mission creep’ with mission statements, and for new businesses, or older ones that are struggling to grasp and commit to their key activities, a mission statement can be the secret weapon that keeps them on target.

Simply put, a mission statement is applied when there is a doubt test. When you wonder whether to zoom off in a new or parallel direction because a client suggests it or a competitor leaves a gap in the market, comparing the new idea to the mission statement keeps on course.

What is a business mission statement?

A mission statement is a focused, attainable, simple statement. Being the biggest Murg provider in the world is a fantastic ambition and it sounds simple but it’s not focused, and may not be attainable. Being one of the top ten Murg providers in Europe, with a skilled workforce and well-funded research programme to provide new Murg add-ons for future customers is focused, attainable and simple.

How to write a mission statement

Think of it like a laser. It’s a narrowly focused weapon that cuts through the rubbish to reveal the core of things. To get it right, make sure it:

1.    Solves unmet needs
2.    Leverages key skills within your organisation
3.    Energises and inspires your employees
4.    Anticipates change
5.    Is memorable.

Somali Mission courtesy of expertinfantry

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Making customer service work

Posted by Michael under Business Growth, customer service, Entrepreneur Resources, Leadership, Social Media

A recent article in Inc suggests an unusual approach for any business that has an intensive service profile: hotel and retail and personal services, travel and holiday industries and every form of catering to name but a few. The problem it seeks to address is the issue that if you’re giving great customer experiences to those in front of you, customers further back in the queue may be losing patience and eventually, you lose their business.

So what’s the answer? According to a study entitled ‘The Quality-Speed Conundrum: Trade-offs in Customer-Intensive Services’, published in Management Science, it’s simply to find the right balance between service and speed, and while that includes a complex algorithm or two, the bottom line is that you end up deciding how many people you can serve superlatively and limiting your service to that number.

This means that you set the price for the customer number that’s optimum and stick to that price/number ratio without reducing service by adding more customers. But how many of us can honestly do that?

Alternative approaches include outsourcing or crowd-sourcing non-customer facing processes so that you can concentrate on driving a customer service ethic from the top.

This means establishing an expectation understanding with your customers – where possible before they actually become customers – and setting up systems that check you meet those expectations more or less all the time.

•    Begin by deciding what you can do, what you can’t do, and what you do that nobody else can do. Should existing customers be addressed by name whenever they call? Do you want a random audit of customer satisfaction every month? What about mystery shopping? How will you handle complaints and suggestions for improvements? What will you do to reward loyalty?
•    Make sure your staff, but more importantly, your customers, know how and when they can access this customer service. There’s no point offering superlative service if it doesn’t work for the times when your customers can access it.
•    Ensure consistency in response – don’t agree you will call customers back by phone within 24 hours but allow a week to pass before responding to emails.
•    Be honest about failure – things will go wrong, and telling your customers (where possible, in advance) that you know there’s a problem, and what you’re doing to rectify it, goes a long way to turning a negative customer experience into a good one. If there’s a postal strike planned, make sure your website, facebook page, twitter feed and phone staff all know the details of your alternative delivery system. If bad weather or some other uncontrollable force knocks out your service team, be ready with a fall-back system like an outsourcing centre, and be clear to your regular customers that this is a fall-back and they may not get the consistent familiar service they expect from your organisation.
•    Offer alternatives – if you can’t do what people want, suggest somebody else who can. It sounds risky but it’s better to hand over a relatively happy customer than lose a disgruntled one: often they come back if you’ve done the decent thing.

Poor customer service image courtesy of Matthew Wilkes

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