April 26, 2023
It’s the end of an era: Bed Bath & Beyond is officially calling it quits. No more need for those 20%-off blue-and-white coupons — especially since their store closing sales are about to offer some serious discounts.
Hot off the SMB press this week:
STARTER PACK
You may get tired of hearing it, but we’ll never get tired of saying it: Documentation is crucial for the continued success and sustainable growth of your business. But while you may immediately assume we’re going to jump into a spiel about documenting your processes and policies, allow us to surprise you — today, we’re talking about roles and responsibilities.
Clearly defined roles and responsibilities are a must have for any growing business. Why? Because when you document them, team alignment and collaboration simply fall into place. There are no more questions of who’s responsible for what, and you set clear expectations of what’s required from the different members of your team.
In other words, if you want to increase your productivity and save time and money, it’s time to start documenting your roles and responsibilities.
👉 And who better to document first than the person in charge of developing strategies for improving efficiency and productivity across your business: the operations manager. This role template provides a sample list of common responsibilities — easily customizable to reflect your business’ unique needs.
Just head to the Roles page in your Trainual account to build out your operations manager role. Then you can easily assign training to anyone with that role and give your whole team visibility into what that person is in charge of. New to Trainual? Try for free.
Can’t wait a whole week for your next template? Check out our entire template archive of free, multimedia-enhanced, and customizable policy, process, and role starters.
PREPARE FOR THE WORST
Strategic planning? In April?
You might think of strategic planning as an annual occasion that happens in December or January — but when you’re a small business in a rapidly changing industry, you need to react and make pivots more than just once a year.
And think about how often your plans happen exactly as you imagined. Unless you can see the future, your success rate probably isn’t that high — estimates show that strategic planning only goes as planned 10 to 30 percent of the time.
And that’s because it’s notoriously tough.
When it comes to planning for the future of your business, biases tend to get in the way. And when it comes to affecting your strategic planning, no bias is more guilty than “planning fallacy.” In other words, the tendency to underestimate the time and budget needed to get stuff done — which can lead to impossible timelines, a lack of proper resources, and an absence of backup plans.
But here’s how to beat the bias:
You and your team may be familiar with the postmortem analysis — AKA, that period after a strategy has failed when you try to figure out why. We’re suggesting changing up the sequence of events: To prevent your strategy from failing, conduct your analysis before you make any decisions.
That way, you can look at a strategy’s prospective flaws with hindsight, giving you a better understanding of where your strategy could go wrong — along with the opportunity to make it better. Thus becoming a premortem analysis.
Want to try this with your team? There are ten steps to follow:
TECH UNSAVVY
Wait… aren’t Gen Zers supposed to be tech geniuses?
Aha — gotcha! While boomers may appear to get the brunt of tech-related age discrimination in the workplace, there are biases for a wider range of generations when it comes to tech-shaming.
Gen Z is stereotyped as the generation in kahoots with all things technology — after all, most of them probably started using phones before they could even walk. But, newsflash: Being a youngin doesn’t make you an expert, just like being older doesn’t make you technologically impaired.
Here’s the problem: Companies often assume that their youngest employees can naturally navigate every piece of tech in the office. And when they can’t, they’re left feeling like a disappointment to their manager and peers.
Now that you mention it, I might be guilty of putting unrealistic expectations on my Gen Z employees.
Your next step is making your small business a little more tech-friendly for every skill level on your team. Here’s how:
👉 More tips for a tech-friendly workplace.
TL; DR