Why Do Small Business Owners Struggle With Accountability?

admin — Sun, 03 Oct 2010 22:49:09 +0000

When I speak with small business owners, the conversation almost always comes round to the question, “How do I make my people accountable? The immediate response I make is “Tell them, measure them, then trust them.”

Now I know that is a big step, and is not an easy one, but trust is a critical part of the process. Let us examine this in a little more detail. We all by now know that accountability grows from a two way process.

i) The owner / manager must clearly define his expectations and delegate the required authority. This is the part of the equation which most owners do not do well. There are no job descriptions, to bench marks, no agreed goals, no definition of good performance;

ii) Measurement processes must be in place so that both the owner and the employee can determine if the expectations are being met. This is where we need to have some job costing process, some physical measurement which everybody understands. This does not have to be expansive nor a major chore, but it should be sufficient that both sides can agree when the performance is up to the mark.

The two requirements above sound grandiose but let me give you an example from the real world. A masonry contractor has a single prime metric of performance – brick counts. These vary by type of brick or block, but can be defined in reasonable completeness. So then you set up a reporting system which gathers details of counts and you can now hold your site supervisors accountable for achieving those numbers on an overall site basis, and they can hold their masons accountable for individual performance.

So now we turn to trust. If you have both the above requirements in place it is much easier to trust that all is well. If it were not so, your measurement will tell you. Now you don’t have to rush down to the job site every day, and those interminable cell phone calls, when you should be concentrating on your driving, become a thing of the past.

And a funny thing happened on your way to the golf course for the first time in years, your supervisors felt good. They know what they have to do, they know you know they are doing a good job, and they feel accountable not to let you down, and they most often wont. But if they do, you will soon know and be able to deal with it!

Real Estate Office Management Tips

admin — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 15:26:43 +0000

The assets industry professionals are some of the busiest people of the working community. They deal with clients, prospective clients, and contacts and maintain their records on paper or electronic databases. They have a lot of deadlines to meet in short periods of time and as they have to simultaneously deal with a number of situations at a given time, they can be pretty haphazard in the way they organize things around themselves, which in turn increases the complexity of their work and reduces their efficiency. Following a few real estate office management guidelines will do them good

One of the foremost criteria for enhancing work efficiency is to work in a systematic manner. The first step in this direction is to identify the routine activities and the ones that are done under special circumstances and develop a working methodology independently for each of them. The routine activities should be organized well. The daily input, daily processed information and daily output information stores should be maintained well. The staff handling these data store should be trained on handling them in a formal procedural manner.

The real estate office management staff should design a concrete system to deal with data storing and processing, and following the system should be made mandatory for the relevant staff. This will ensure fast retrieval of data when dealing with clients. A good assets managing firm will always try to take precautions against any special situations that they might encounter. Hence, if electronic databases are being used, then it is always better to be prepared with backups as electronic systems are highly susceptible to viral attacks and technical failures.

A good way to eliminate chaos in the work environment is for the real estate office management firm to make individual job descriptions for all its employees. These job descriptions should be conveyed clearly in writing to them so that they become aware of their individual roles and work accordingly. Assigning a particular job to only one person and not to more people will eliminate confusion. If a job is too huge in quantity or is highly complicated one job can be allotted to more than one person. But in that case, the role that each and every member of the delegation has to play should be conveyed clearly by the team leader.

Real office estate management gurus opine that it is always better to make any modifications and up dates to the databases as and when required rather then take them up as a separate task later on. This error usually happens where paper databases are used as the modifications and up dates have to be done manually. But in the case of electronic data basing this problem is overcome to a large extent as the effects of a change at one point ripples across all the relevant areas of the database automatically.

Lastly, an important criterion of commendable real estate office management is to organize the physical workspace systematically. The tables should be kept neat and tidy. Storing files and paraphernalia should be done in a logical manner so that accessing them does not take a lot of effort and time. A neat, hygienic and organized workspace reflects an efficient working environment. Managing workplaces is an art and it reflects the personality and work efficiency of the people working in that place. It makes the organization efficiency wise trustworthy in the eyes of the clients.

Simply Junior » Job Descriptions

Why Do Small Business Owners Struggle With Accountability?

Real Estate Office Management Tips