As a business owner, making changes can be a challenging yet enduring task. However, if your business doesn’t make any changes and ignores essential trends in the industry, you could be destined for failure.
Especially in today’s modern world, change comes about as quickly as the weekly newspaper. With technology and social media revamping industry and organizational strategies, companies have to be ready to make alterations to their business.
The problem for restoration contractors is that there are often numerous people involved on a project at any given time. Whether it’s your crew, clients or other partners involved on your jobsite, you have to keep everyone up to date with the latest trends.
Dale Kirke, a learning development specialist for Thales Training and Consultancy, explained in a contributing piece for Small Biz Trends, that what can be so difficult about this undertaking is not everyone welcomes change. In fact, with the world changing dramatically each year, business strategies can seem overwhelming and your crew could be skeptical or resistant about upcoming changes.
Being seamless in your transitions
As a restorer, implementing change and keeping workers happy can be a tricky balancing act. However, if you’re serious about making changes to your company, you can likely look back and reminisce on how you yourself might have been skeptical.
Transformations have to be done sensitively, carefully and collaboratively so the process is seamless, Kirke explained. You have to be able to manage people through these changes so they don’t feel like the organization or daily operations will slip away.
Changing a part of your business can be demanding for those in your organization.
For most workers, they don’t mind being told the rules and best practices for the job. Instead, problems tend to arise when these “best practices” constantly change and seem unimportant. You have to ensure you’re seamless with your transitions so nobody truly second-guesses your decisions. You want to show your workers that the new change in operations is the best way to run the business.
Make sure everyone is on the same page
One of the most critical steps in implementing change to your business operations is to make sure crews, partners, clients and stakeholders all know about the upcoming changes, John P. Kotter said in his report Leading Change, originally posted in the Harvard Business Review.
Once you have everyone on the same page, you can work as a team to introduce the new changes. You want to make sure your most important business partners have your support with the changes. This will help you become a better leader and organizer in your restoration business.
According to the Thriving Small Business, a strategic development and growth consultancy, employee involvement is critical to ensure everyone is up to date on the change. Those working on your team need to know why their job process will benefit from the new changes. If you fail to inform each person on your team about the changes, they could take it as an insult to their contribution to the company.
“You want to make sure there’s a clear reason to your decisions.”
Clearly state your problems
If you are ready to make a serious change, you need to clearly state your problems you encounter right now. According to Jeff Marsee’s 10 Steps For Implementing Change, released by the University of Virginia, there needs to be a meaningful reason for your decisions to make changes.
Whether you are lacking new technology or need to change your strategies to cut downtime, you want to make sure there’s a clear reason to your decisions.
“Since placing efforts in the right direction is as important as identifying resources and maintaining effort once the decision for change has been made, completing a serious environmental scan also helps ensure that change efforts are meaningful,” Marsee stated.
Show what your changes will accomplish
In a tech-savvy world, it can be overwhelming to adopt new technology into your business. However, you could seriously reap the benefits by having data to show you how you’re increasing business, making more money or improving customer satisfaction.
By adopting DASH Enterprise’s platform, you can use technology to show your crew how this software can make visible beneficial changes to your company. With job site report and client portal functions, your team will not only grasp, but be able to use this technology for the better of your company. Sometimes change is needed and it could start with DASH.
