Performance Improvement: Tips for UK Businesses

For UK businesses, every quarter and the end of every financial year provide the opportunity to identify areas for performance improvement throughout their operations. Typically, this should involve evaluating what each department can do to maximise productivity and remain on track to not only meet targets but even exceed them. In the current landscape, where maintaining good cash flow and profitability are imperative, directors and middle managers charged with driving the business forward can find it stressful. Thankfully, there are several steps they can take to make this happen. In this post, we’ll outline six tips UK businesses can embrace to increase their overall levels of performance improvement. If you take these strategies on board, you’ll go a long way towards moving your organisation up another level.

1. Understand Your Current Situation

Before you implement any measures related to performance improvement, you’ll need to understand where your company is currently heading. Doing this will help you take stock of your current situation and serve as the benchmark against which the success of any improvement strategies you introduce will be measured. If you are serious about improving your productivity and overall performance, there are plenty of tools you can use to assess your business's current performance. One of the most effective tools to help you do this is a SWOT analysis, which will help you recognise both the strengths and weaknesses of your business. In addition, it will also highlight any opportunities and threats that might influence your ability to meet targets. This can include the industry your organisation operates in, the current UK business landscape and the global economic situation. Another good tool to use is our employee training assessment app.

2. Set and Track Business Goals and KPI'S

In their Performance improvement plan (PIP), many companies set several major goals they want to achieve within a specific timeframe. However, if they set too many, they might not be able to devote sufficient resources to any of them to achieve the best results possible. Ideally, businesses should identify three to five goals they want to achieve to increase their overall efficiency. It is important that these goals are SMART — Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound — because if they are not, then your targets will be much harder to meet. These goals should be prioritised in order of importance, and it might be worth focusing on accomplishing them one at a time. Ultimately, you want them to be seamlessly slotted into your daily operations. Overall, there are hundreds of KPI and metrics tools you can use to analyse how your strategies for improving business performance are tracking. Here are some of the most popular options according to business.com.

3. Mitigate Potential Risks

For UK businesses, risk management is an integral part of any performance improvement plan. Therefore, it is important that your organisation handles this aspect of things well. The success or failure of risk management lies not just in properly identifying what may harm your business operation but also in developing and rolling out strategies to neutralise it. For instance, companies should have contingency plans for disruptions caused by economic downturns, operational failures, and natural disasters. If they do, it will go a long way towards lessening their impact on their operations and enabling them to carry on pursuing their objectives as normally as they can. Sadly, you can’t plan for every eventuality because risk often goes hand in hand with unpredictability. That said, adopting risk management planning can provide your business with the foresight and wherewithal to turn the negative impacts of a potential risk into something that might end up providing you with a positive outcome.

4. Invest in Your Employees

The success of any business is often due, in large part, to the quality of the people who work for it. Arguably, your employees are your biggest asset, so it is important to maximise their potential and performance levels by putting significant investment into their professional development. Companies should ensure that all staff members are provided with the training and development opportunities they need to perform their job responsibilities to the best of their ability. When done successfully, training can increase each employee's effectiveness and productivity and improve their levels of job satisfaction by making them feel valued and appreciated. This is a crucial factor because the happier staff members are, the more companies generate a cohesive culture based on encouraging engaged employees to strive for continuous improvement.

5. Focus on Customer Care

Businesses can’t survive without customers, especially repeat customers. Therefore, the more an organisation focuses on developing strong relationships with its customers, the greater the chances of this translating into increased sales and improved business performance. Offering outstanding customer service is a great starting point for improvement in this area. This should involve understanding customers' needs, motivations, preferences, and expectations and communicating with them regularly. Arguably, the best way to do this is to gain honest and constructive feedback from customers about what they liked and disliked about all aspects of your business's purchasing lifecycle. It is important not to take what you are told to heart but rather to use it as an opportunity to improve your overall service. Keeping customers happy is so vital to a business because they can act as unofficial sales agents. Often, they spread the virtues of purchasing from you through various mediums, including social media, blogging, and word of mouth.

6. Analyse and Measure Your Results

Lastly, no matter what strategies you implement for performance improvement, it is imperative that you stringently monitor the degree to which you are meeting the goals you set. There are several ways you can do this. For instance, with simple tasks, measurement of the activity can be done by simply stating ‘complete’ or ‘pending’. However, for your key goals, you will probably find it most helpful to measure the results by number crunching specific quantitative data. This might be the percentage of profit increase or overall number of sales. Setting milestones is a very effective way to increase productivity overall because it helps employees keep up to date with how well the plan is tracking. Additionally, it can make them more motivated to get to the next milestone if they are only a short way from achieving it and it also allows them to celebrate little wins when they do achieve them.

FAQs

Here are some answers to questions UK businesses frequently ask about performance improvement.

What is a performance improvement strategy?

A performance improvement strategy is something businesses develop in an attempt to enhance its overall productivity and that of their employees. Typically, it involves identifying areas of company, team and individual performance that that can be completed in a much more effective way and addressing these opportunities through training, coaching, and goal setting.

How can a UK business be improved?

UK Businesses can adopt several tactics to improve their productivity. Some of the most effective include investing in their employees, focusing on customer care, and mitigating risks.