I used to run a manufacturing business back in the day. I would typically put in 60 to 70-hour work weeks while doing work from my cold, and uninspiring office. I also had to drive to work daily, be present in meetings all day and deal with office matters.
I had no space to breathe, and there was no time left for my family. The business demands meant that I had to be at a specific place for a specific task; there was a rigid set of rules that governed the way I ran my business. In short, the business was set up in an unyielding way that forced me to adjust to its needs. I was a slave to my business.
I had 2 small daughters during that time and I seldom got to see them because of this lifestyle. I pretty soon found myself asking: Is this grind truly worth missing out on the more important things in my life?
Similarly, my employees were also experiencing the same things I did – working like a slave until it was time to clock out, only to do it all over again the next day. This is never an ideal scenario for businesses and their employees. I realized that we were missing flexibility.
Fortunately for my business and employees, I’ve ditched this outdated way of operating my business. Our quality of life has never been better. It’s one of the best decisions I’ve made ever since.
Flexibility: Is Your Business Still Stuck In The Past?
That business was built around a lot of old-school concepts that were often inefficient and unreasonable. Being flexible enabled us to achieve the same objectives while achieving more productivity, and having more time for the things that truly matter.
Flexibility also freed us from the restraints of working in one location, allowing us to do our best work while having time for personal pursuits.
In this article we’re going to take a closer look into flexibility, and why it’s crucial to ideal businesses.
Conventional Ways Of Working Are No Longer Necessary
Ever since the industrial revolution began, we have been conditioned to think that working 40 hours a week is the minimum number of hours a person must work to stay productive. I strongly disagree with this. I think this a flawed concept that decreases the quality of people’s lives.
I place a high emphasis on productivity versus the number of hours worked. In fact, no one in my business works for more than 30 hours a week. My employees continue to enjoy a very high level of success and fulfillment both professionally and personally despite working fewer hours than most conventional businesses.
The Advantages of Remote Working
One of the key aspects of all my businesses is that we don’t have office locations. I’ve built up my businesses within frameworks that fully support remote working. The ability to work remotely is one of the greatest things I’ve done for my businesses. It saves everyone’s time, it means that employees don’t have to spend resources to get to the office, and neither do I.
My employees now enjoy a great deal of flexibility allowing them to attend to important matters that require their attention such as attending their child’s school event. Another great benefit is that I get to save on overhead costs. As long as you have the proper systems and framework in place, productivity will never be an issue.
Why Autonomy Produces Great Results
Giving people greater autonomy over their time allows them to perform their best work. I find that engaging people this way helps to increase employee satisfaction and loyalty – as a matter of fact, many of my employees have been with me for years.
Working smarter, not harder is the way to go. As long as business objectives and tasks are achieved, the time it takes to complete those becomes irrelevant. Ideal businesses not only think about the bottom line, but they also add value to the lives of their employees by giving them more personal time. When you take care of your employees, they take care of you. All of this can be achieved if your business is flexible.
Flexibility: A Game-Changing Trait That All Ideal Businesses Must Have
Why did you decide to become an entrepreneur? Chances are that one of your answers would be along the lines of “I want to have more time”. Unfortunately, many business owners that I know of are achieving the exact opposite of this desire – they find themselves enslaved to their business operations. Their businesses dictate their schedule, they no longer have time for themselves.
Thoughts of going on a holiday become wishful thinking at best, and when they do take a vacation, thoughts about the business hound them. Then they finally give in and check on their staff. Does this sound familiar?
Flexibility enables time and financial freedom
Flexibility removes the constraints that conventional businesses impose on their owners. It means that you have the freedom to spend your time on the things that matter most to you.
Why is flexibility so important for an ideal business? Being flexible means that you, the owner, are not bound by operational commitments, and time constraints. Flexibility means you can work on the business from anywhere in the world, at any point in time, and without any schedule pressure.
My business, Resicert, allows me to work for less than 25 hours a week, plus I get to enjoy long vacations that can last up to several months on end. This has been made possible because of the flexibility I built into my business. Despite being away from it, I can still conduct meetings and effectively communicate with my team members who are thousands of miles away from me.
Actionable Ideas To Foster Business Flexibility
The key to flexibility is having the right mindset from the get-go and being deliberate about building your business around flexibility.
Flexibility doesn’t just encompass my way of working, I’ve also built flexibility into my recruitment procedures and this has given me better candidates with higher chances of success compared to traditional recruitment processes I’ve tried in the past.
These are the changes you can adopt to transform your business into a flexible one.
Ditch the “9 to 5” mindset
Flexible businesses are not restricted by schedules, it means that employees have the freedom to work on certain tasks at their own pace and time, as long as objectives are performed to the required standard, and within deadlines.
A schedule that works for one person won’t always work for the other person on the team and there are certain times throughout the day that a person is more productive e.g early morning for morning people. Employees that are given autonomy over the way they organize their work schedule tend to have higher job satisfaction compared to those bound by schedules.
A great way to start here is by optimizing tasks and setting up automation that help employees work less while achieving more.
Remote working is the future of work
Location is now irrelevant. Because of technology, we are more connected than ever and work can now be accomplished from the comfort of our homes. Meetings can be held over video calls. With the advent of online collaboration tools, working remotely has never been easier.
Working from home has countless benefits but perhaps the most important is being able to spend time with loved ones.I highly value this one.
Because of the Covid-19 pandemic, we’ve seen a dramatic shift from conventional on-site work to a hybrid remote working setup with many companies opting to be 100% fully remote, including ours. Countless studies have shown that remote working has numerous benefits over on-site work including higher productivity, and higher employee retention rates.
Most of the businesses I’ve encountered are reluctant to switch to a work-from-home setup because they haven’t mastered the systems, and procedures necessary to operate without an office. To do this, you need to conduct an in-depth assessment of your business operations and see which tasks can be done from home. Identify those tasks that need to be done in an office. But from my experience, I rarely see the need for in-person work especially when you optimize your business for remote working.
Define clear expectations
The key to successful remote working is to ensure that your people know exactly what to do, and how to do it effectively. Clear expectations eliminate unnecessary back and forth which takes away time that could’ve been used to perform the task at hand.
To have a framework of flexibility for you and your team, it is also essential that you provide your team members with proper definitions of outcomes rather than tasks. I call these outcomes “products”. Tasks are vague but products are specific and measurable.
Emphasize the product rather than the activity itself. For example, a task for a sales agent would be to answer all incoming sales queries. An outcome on the other hand would look like “Respond professionally to all inbound sales emails within 1 day of receipt ensuring that all inquiries are dealt with according to standards”.
Defining KPIs and other metrics is integral for setting up clear expectations from your employees.
Aim to reduce time-specific tasks
Not all work is created equal. Some work such as meeting clients needs to be performed at specific time slots such as the case of an appointment. Other tasks like filing reports aren’t time-bound and may be performed at any point within the day.
If you want to achieve a flexible work structure then you must aim to reduce these time-specific tasks as much as possible. Tasks that are time-bound hinder flexibility and therefore must be minimized.
Trust your employees
By empowering your team to perform autonomously at their own pace, you are giving them the chance to do well while saving yourself from unnecessary micromanaging that takes more time away from you.
For this to work, you must have systems and clearly defined metrics in place that create accountability to track performance.
Fast-tracked recruitment approach
The traditional recruitment process goes something like this: you advertise a job opening, receive hundreds of emails, screen the CVs one by one, shortlist about a dozen candidates, and then interview each one and choose the best fit. This process is painstaking, slow, and inefficient.
I adopt a no-nonsense approach when it comes to recruitment. My process starts with an advert. Then, I send them an email that contains key info about my business along with questions they need to answer in video format. In this email, I also outline the good, the bad and the ugly of working for my business. This email acts like a filter that weeds out the determined ones from those that aren’t.
I highly recommend video responses to the questions being asked because these are a great way for gauging the fit of a candidate based on their tone, disposition, and overall impact. At this point only about a dozen candidates remain out of the hundreds that had initially responded. I then schedule a quick chat for the best fit for the role based on the video responses I received.
Expedited Onboarding: The best way to engage new team members
Whenever I onboard a new team member, I prefer to assume that these new hires are temporary because most of the time they are likely to stay for a short time only. So instead of doing a full onboarding, I like to engage them in what I call an expedited engagement cycle.
We provide them with the minimum orientation necessary to effectively execute the job requirements. The reason for this is that onboarding is a time-consuming process and with new hires, there is never any guarantee that they will stay. We typically give them about 3 to 4 weeks to see if they stay and only then are they given the full onboarding process.
Anticipating that new hires are likely to flake away is a mindset that enables the business to stay nimble and flexible whenever the need for a replacement arises.
Weekly Meetings
Weekly cadence meetings are an excellent means of keeping employees in check and also increasing accountability to make sure everyone is performing well. Meetings also serve as platforms for employee engagement. This is where tasks are clarified and expectations are also explained. This is especially important with remote working setups because team members do not see each other face-to-face.
Meetings should be structured, and objectives must be defined when setting up one. Meetings that do not have a clear plan tend to drag on for hours without achieving much. The primary objective of these coordination meetings is to ensure that the business is on track, address critical issues, and ensure that objectives are being completed.
Flexibility Helps You Achieve More In Life
For many business owners, achieving time freedom is the ultimate goal. This includes the freedom to do the things that you’ve always wanted to do and to live life to the fullest. In short, flexibility is an enabler to achieve more in life.
Your business should never dictate your day-to-day schedule. Instead, it should empower you to pursue your goals with no bounds. This is what an ideal business is all about. To learn more about how I redesigned my business to become more ideal, join our newsletter. https://idealbusiness.invizbiz.com/newsletter