If you are a business owner, leader or manager, chances are your day to day working experience is heavily influenced by the current performance of the business.  If things are going well and customers are buying your products and services at profitable prices, this usually correlates with a happy team who are able to keep doing a great job.  Your job is enjoyable.

However if pressure is high and there is constant talk about cutting costs and discounting prices, team member worries and anxieties can consume their attention, reducing their ability to do their job well.  The irony is of course that when things aren’t going well, this is when you need everyone to be at their best. These are the times when your isn’t all that enjoyable.

So how can we help?  Think of Tandem as your solution to collecting important information about important things.  Instead of just thinking about doing a ‘survey’ that collects information about the experience of customers and employees, you can also use Tandem to support a process of continuous improvement to build a better business.

How to use Tandem to build a better business?

One of the biggest opportunities missed by most companies is to engage the company’s greatest asset – it’s team members – in a way that helps to keep improving the company and building a better business. For example, most companies do an employee survey that focuses on asking team members about their experience. Whilst this is not a bad idea, it can be a missed opportunity. Most of your competitors are probably relying on leaders and managers to make all the suggestions about how to improve the business, but you can build a better business by asking for their suggestions for how to improve things. You see, every team member in your company plays a role in producing what the company offers to customers. Because they are so close to the action, they are the most likely people to be able to spot a potential problem BEFORE it ends up disappointing customers.

By implementing a regular process to tap the inner intelligence of your company on a regular basis (we suggest quarterly), it means you are creating a performance improvement drumbeat that keeps improving things. These improvements don’t need to be expensive things that take ages to implement, it’s the benefits of many small improvements right across the company that can make a very big difference to your overall performance.

In our next blog post, we will look at the questions you can ask as the basis of your continuous performance improvement drumbeat.