3 Ways Small Businesses Can Improve Employee Engagement

Employee engagement has an impact on everything from productivity to employee retention to morale. A variety of studies have found that highly engaged workplaces have 20% or higher productivity and profits per employee than those that don’t. Let’s look at three ways companies can improve their employee engagement.

1. Get Honest Feedback and Then Act on It

Companies must first determine the level of employee engagement instead of acting based on impressions and anecdotes. Data driven management decisions are not impossible in Human Resources, but they may not be possible if the people collecting the data are biased in how they collect the data or interpret it.

The solution is to outsource employee engagement surveys to third parties such as Insightlink (for more information about Insightlink and their services, click here) so that management doesn’t receive overly rosy reports or biased action plans. This can happen because employees are afraid to tell HR about problems out of fear it will get back to their managers, data collection may ignore high non-response rates in favor of the skewed positive image or use feedback as justification for its pre-existing desired actions instead of what employees want. When a third party runs anonymous surveys, you’ll get more honest information than if HR could come back to “talk” to submitters and more detailed, actionable advice.

7 Tips for Effective Credit Control in Small Business

Many small businesses overlook the importance of credit control. They assume that because the orders and sales are rolling in thick and fast, everything is great. What they fail to realize is that if a few customers don’t pay, their cash flow will dry up.

You need to be proactive about collecting payments from your customers. It’s not enough to send out an invoice and forget about it. There will always be some customers who wait as long as possible before making payment. The problem is that if you don’t have enough money flowing into the business, it affects your ability to pay your own suppliers. Some might be understanding, but others, in particular the IRS, definitely won’t take kindly to being made to wait for payment.

The best way to manage your cash flow is to be on the ball with your credit control. The onus is on you to set up an effective credit control system. Accounts receivable financing will free up cash flow, but this doesn’t solve the underlying problem. Effective credit control should be implemented from the outset, so you start on the right foot. Here are some tips to get you started.

1. Use an Efficient Accounting System

It pays to be organized in business. A fully functional accounting system is essential, as this will help you to monitor your income and expenditure. There are plenty of free accounting systems, but many businesses prefer to use a recognized system such as Sage. If in doubt, ask your account for advice, but whatever you do, don’t ignore the day-to-day bookkeeping.