As a business owner, your primary purpose is to make executive decisions to succeed your company. However, given the experience of the people under you, your business might be prone to mismanagement. Therefore, it’s crucial to identify the problems with mismanagement and how you can handle them today and in the future.
It’s estimated that one in 12 businesses close every year, and one of the leading causes of this is mismanagement. Mismanagement doesn’t only affect your business operations. It will cost you revenue, increase your expenses, and eventually damage your productivity. In some situations, mismanagement can lead to a PR disaster or civil court. Here are some ways you can identify if your business is being mismanaged.
Losing Employees
You can identify that your business is being mismanaged when your employee turnover skyrockets over a given amount of time. A bad relationship with a manager or a boss is the leading reason employees leave a job.
A ‘bad relationship’ can mean a lot of things. For example, it can mean that a manager is overworking their employees, or it can also mean sexual harassment. Both of which are bad for your company.
Deadlines Are Being Missed
The reality is that no company can work perfectly, but it can work efficiently. Sometimes, you might miss deadlines and ask clients for a couple more days. This is normal. However, what isn’t normal is that it keeps happening throughout the year.
Management is directly related to the productivity and efficiency of a company, and clear identification of mismanagement is when your business is missing deadlines way too often. First, try to check your projects and see whether if you’re finishing them on time. If not, maybe it’s time to ask the people under you as to what is happening.
Negativity
Lastly, you know that your company is being mismanaged when many employees see more of the negative sides of the company than the positive ones. Again, you don’t necessarily have to ask them a question. All you have to do is see the look on their faces.
A pessimistic employee looks unmotivated, anxious, and stressed. They don’t speak out during meetings and tend to bring dysfunction to your company. If you see multiple employees like this, it means that their work and tasks aren’t doing very great, or they’re stuck doing rudimentary tasks every day. Keep an eye out for this, because it can lead to disaster in your company like the two other things we have mentioned above.
So how do you handle mismanagement in your company? Do you conduct a purge of managers? Do you give more rewards to incentivize employees? Or do you set up a meeting with managers and ask them what is going on? Well, these are all logical solutions, but they won’t make sense right now because there is a great possibility that upper management is in denial. So what do you do?
Give Employees Breathing Room
You’re going to need to give your employees a break or at least give them the chance to work on something worthwhile. Mismanaged employees tend to work on tasks that are too rudimentary for their liking. One of the examples of these tasks is payroll in your human resource department.
Payroll can be an easy task for a small company with one dedicated HR officer. However, if your company has grown, you’re going to need to outsource payroll services to another company so that your HR can concentrate more on meaningful tasks such as onboarding and acquiring more employees. This is just one of the examples of ways you can give your employees breathing room from mismanagement.
Set up a Metric
Mismanaged businesses are those usually that don’t have metrics that identify productivity within the workplace. Without a proper set of metrics, managers will do what they think they see fit in your company, and this means bringing old habits they might have from personal experience.
This is why you should set up metrics in identifying mismanagement in your company. Then, have an experienced manager or CEO run a learning program so that your managers can be more aware of what mismanagement is so that they can follow the metrics you’ve set up.
Engage With Employees
Lastly, as a business owner, you must engage with employees once in a while. This is so that you can get to know more about their current situation. In addition, this will help you identify mismanagement in its roots.
Mismanagement can be tough, and this can lead your business to fail. However, if you identify the signs of mismanagement early on, you can take the necessary precautions to save your company from it.