Good business management is key for anyone in charge of a company, organization, or team. The way you interact with your staff, peers, and stakeholders is critical for helping your business develop. Awareness of business management practices and strategies also helps you get the most out of your team, and makes it easier to manage projects.
Table of contents
1. What is business management?
2. Why is business management important?
2.1. Improved efficiency
2.2. Cost saving
2.3. Navigating change
3. Business management techniques
3.1. Recognize employees
3.2. Provide employee training
3.3. Be transparent
3.4. Adopt technology
What is business management?
Business management is an umbrella term that refers to all the activities required to keep your business well-organized, planned, and running. Managing a business means making sure day-to-day activities are executed without any issues and keeping track of multiple areas.
You can also understand business management as the balance between achieving business goals and using as few resources as possible. Business managers use strategic management techniques in order to get the best results from their employees.
There are skills that every good business manager needs to have. These are:
- Communication skills: As a manager, you’ll need to deal with colleagues, stakeholders, and higher management, and to maintain a relationship with all of them
- Accounting skills: One of the most important functions of company management is setting a budget, and then making sure it is followed
- Leadership skills: Managing employee morale and knowing how to motivate them is crucial to good management
- Interpersonal skills: Good personal skills are essential when you’re communicating with so many different people from various areas of the business, especially if there is a disagreement
- Planning skills: As much as business management means handling the day-to-day, it also means keeping an eye on the big picture and making sure all of those daily activities are working towards business goals
- Organizational skills: Prioritizing tasks and delegating responsibilities are necessary parts of a business manager’s job
- Problem-solving skills: Occasionally, there will be issues that arise, no matter how well you do your job. As a business manager, you should be able to determine the pros and cons of a decision quickly so you can make a choice
- Why the company exists
- What the company does
- What the top priorities are
- Who is doing what
Why is business management important?
Business management is vital to the success of any company; almost 90% of new businesses and startups fail within 5 years, and it’s typically because of management-related issues. In addition to that, higher internal and external competition has made business process management harder, as the bar for efficiency is raised.
Establishing and maintaining a productive business environment is essential for business success. The benefits of business management (and the consequences of poor management) are too important to neglect.
Improved efficiency
Good business management makes your company more efficient and helps everyone function as a unit. One way managers do this is by making sure everyone is pursuing shared goals. By clarifying exactly what the aims of the business are and how your employees fit into those aims, teamwork becomes much easier.
Another way to improve business efficiency is by matching tasks to the appropriate employee. Managers need to evaluate the skill sets of their employees to give them the right jobs. A good business manager knows where their employees excel and assigns them responsibilities based on this.
Cost saving
Increasing efficiency also ends up saving your business money. Understanding how best to use your resources – whether they’re people or capital – helps cut down on wasted time. That means a higher degree of productivity in the same time frame.
Navigating change
When you’re running a business, things don’t always stay the same. Sudden changes in administrative structure, new technologies, market fluctuations, and other things can shake things up. Adapting to change, also called change management, is a necessary part of business management.
Good company management helps employees and the company deal with otherwise intimidating events. Without clear communication and leadership, meeting newly created needs becomes much harder.
Business management techniques
Business management strategies and policies are a matter of creating a workplace culture. As a manager, you want to foster a culture where employees feel motivated and supported while doing their jobs, and the business is stable. The right management techniques can transform your business.
Recognize employees
Your employees want to know that you appreciate the work they do. Making it clear you see their contributions is a critical component of a positive and stimulated workforce. Rewarding employees for doing their jobs well is not only a great way to build emotional attachment to work, it’s not done nearly often enough.
Studies have shown that only 21% of employees feel appreciated at work. So you can easily set yourself apart by acknowledging good performance. You can take it a step further by implementing a reward system or providing benefits to these employees.
Provide employee training
Making further job and skills training available to your employees not only shows you care about their development, it helps your business. Your workers will apply what they learn to their work, making business process management easier.
Figure out where employee interests lie and what they could benefit from learning, and then help them find training opportunities. Don’t forget to assess how useful the training was for employees.
Be transparent
Since business management is about directing everyone’s efforts towards common goals, it’s important to be clear and honest about those goals. Giving your workers context for their role helps them feel valued. You should make sure everyone knows:
Part of transparency is regular feedback. Establish weekly or monthly check-ins with the people you manage to update them on their progress and clarify expectations. Not only do these meetings help align your goals, but regular communication helps you build a connection with your employees.
Adopt technology
Business management means tracking a lot of different areas and being in many different places, which can be exhausting to manage manually. Luckily, there’s no shortage of programs and software that can help you track and prioritize your duties. Even if it’s as simple as a Google calendar, having things mapped out makes management much less stressful.
Technology can also help your employees understand what their jobs are. Use a platform like Jira or ClickUp to assign tasks and create schedules and distribute checklists to employees in charge of specialized tasks.
Business management is smoother with a digital checklist app like Lumiform. Separate employee profiles and an intuitive interface make it easy for you to assign workers their tasks, create regular inspection protocols, and send updates. The software comes with a template library you can apply to all types of business, from retail to manufacturing to gastronomy to construction; or you can design your own checklist.
