How Powerful Personal Connections Can Increase The Bottom Line

Harnessing the power of personal connections builds strong and lasting relationships. You are looking for ways to match people, organisations and opportunities.Try to develop your own skills with regard to relationship-building throughout your company’s network. The better thought out, innovative and sincere relationships are likely to be more profitable.

You should put equal emphasis on your internal relationships with colleagues, staff and superiors and the external ones – existing and new customers, suppliers and referrers.What will help you do this? Here are a few T words to consider.

Hold On To Your Assets

Before moving on to more advanced methods of dealing with external business contacts, let’s look inside the company for a moment.

Many organisations know that staff hold the key to success but few realise how to capitalise on their greatest asset. So often companies focus on meeting customer needs or increasing the bottom line and forget that its employees can make it happen.

Good practice for people management is a variable process, but some of the main factors involved here are:

enlightened leadership culture

staff involvement at every level in the organisation

staff development to make employees feel valued and challenged

flexible work patterns to meet the needs of both the business and staff.

If you knew it was going to cost you three times as much to replace a member of staff than to retain one, what would you do? Not exactly a difficult question, I hope. But how many people really pay attention to this?

When a company loses a key member of staff they often are the last to realise that it would have been much cheaper to tackle the issues that made those people quit rather than go through the expensive steps needed to replace them.

The real impact on businesses that lose staff regularly and are constantly recruiting new ones is that it probably takes a year’s salary to arrive at ‘break-even’ point. By that I mean the time reached when the new member of staff turns from being a net cost to adding value.

Whatever the solution – and it may not have been simple – it would have been cheaper to address those than to replace a key member of staff. If you value your staff as assets, not just overheads, and retain them and their business relationships, you will save your company significant amounts of money.

Realise Their Potential

Let’s leave the financial issues for a moment. The subject is valuing staff, maximising their potential and regarding them as tangible assets.

People can, and do, make an enormous difference to any organisation. What motivates and drives them to release their potential is the way they are treated by their company. So how do you go about building brilliant business connections amongst staff?

Firms need to find creative ways of motivating employees, sharing knowledge with them for the benefit of the whole organisation. It could be an environmental issue – such as the provision of a pleasant cafe area for informal meetings, or the colour scheme and furnishings of the office area. It could be a change in the managerial and organisational culture.

What about a different dress code – something more informal if the company has a predominantly young staff? Flexible working patterns would be popular if a number of the staff have young children.

Bringing in emphasis on creativity through redesign of work areas or working conditions can make a huge impact on staff morale. Happy staff will remain with the company. If HR and recruitment costs drop, the increase in the company’s bottom line is significant.

Giving Recognition For Good Service

Developing a ‘praise culture’ is something some enlightened firms practise. This can be applied in a number of ways – such as public praise for good work, support for entry to industry award competitions and more social opportunities.

Positive moves including new training methods, cutting-edge technology and introducing a profit-sharing scheme for individual staff on the basis of performance could be other winning formulae for improved staff retention.

Organisations that practise good people management find it brings many benefits including financial success and retention of key staff and their business connections.