Sharing idea's

It's great to share ideas about how to improve day to day activities so we create a positive experience every time we do them. It's always great to receive advice from someone who has already experienced a problem and found a way to overcome it. It could be advice from a friend about a special recipe, gardening technique or an ideal vacation spot. It could be advice from a professional about retirement, investing or financial issues. We really appreciate hearing from other people and learning from their personal experiences.

In a business environment, it’s even more important to share ideas. It's really important to find ways to improve your processes on a consistent basis. It’s the only way to stay ahead of the competition. How do you do this? Well, here are two simple ideas to get you started:

1. When your employees turn up for work every day, encourage them to turn on their creativity at the same time. So many companies have underutilized people sitting around focusing their skills on unnecessary tasks. In many cases employees are not allowed to express innovation or ideas about how to improve their work environment. An organization that can't integrate great ideas from its own employees is doomed to failure in the long term. These people experience real operational issues day in, day out and they understand there’s a need for change. It’s the responsibility of executive management to implement a process that allows these great ideas to be collected, investigated and converted into breakthrough improvements which positively affect bottom line results.

2. Develop a clear understanding of the connection between customer satisfaction and profit. Many companies focus their valuable resources on improving their own internal business functions. However, this does nothing for their customers. If your improvements don’t increase value by reducing costs, lead time, and quality issues, the customer will end up paying more for your products. Improve customer satisfaction and create happy customers, who will continue to do repeat business. Increasing profits are the reward for high customer satisfaction. Unhappy customers on the other hand will only continue to do business until they find a better alternative. They could eventually be directed towards one of your competitors which will reduce market share and profits. Focus your resources on becoming a more effective supplier and improving customer satisfaction, not on efficiency.

Does your company follow these two very simple ideas? If they don’t, then every day they’re losing out to other companies who are using them. Doing nothing, changes nothing, implementing small changes over time deliver greater results.
“Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.” – George Bernard Shaw.