8 Ways Improving Organizational Design For Your Small Business

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Regardless of the staff size, a poor organizational design contradicts business responsibilities. These contradictions may include role confusion, lack of functional coordination, and slower decision-making processes. As a result, businesses may suffer from unnecessary stress, conflict, and complex issues if left unresolved.

To effectively run a small business, entrepreneurs need to implement organizational structures in the workplace. Delegating activities toward achieving the common goal in the industry is the main priority of organizational structures. As a small business owner, you should consider the importance of how enhancing organizational structure can affect your business by partnering with organizational design consulting firms like Navalent.

Without understanding how organizational design works, your small business may risk possible reputation strain and bankruptcy. To prevent these business risks, you must learn to enhance overall corporate practices. In this article, you’ll know the benefits of redesigning the organizational structures in your business.

Managing Small Business Operations With Organizational Design

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The lack of organizational structure may jeopardize a small business due to the employees’ resistance to follow rules that don’t exist. Therefore, as a small business owner, creating a firm organizational structure is crucial in controlling overall business operations. As you incorporate new business structures, your staff will comply with the rules, which smoothens the overall business productivity.

With zero hesitation, your small business can easily make decisions because there’ll be no extra management layers that need approval. For example, your small business can increase revenues and boost employee engagement with quicker decision-making processes. As the organization reaches enhanced sales performance, your small business can be on top of the competition within a shorter period.

Opening Additional Business Locations 

Every startup entrepreneur dreams of eventually becoming a huge corporation. However, with the tough market competition, business owners lose motivation to strive to reach improved market grounds. While this scenario may seem disheartening, you can still prevent staying as a small business and earn the most significant market share by recreating your organizational structure.

You can receive enough revenues to open multiple business locations as you actively restructure and monitor your existing organizational design. When this situation happens, you already have a firm corporate design, helping you maintain, and enhance your market share consistently. Because the structure is the same in every business location, you don’t need to visit each place daily. Hence, adopting an effective organizational design provides you peace of mind, especially as you grow in the industry.

Boosting Overall Employee Performance 

Small businesses heavily rely on human resources to produce supplies and provide customer support. With that, productive employees can meet deadlines and sincerely contribute to building positive customer relationships with your brand. Therefore, if you aim to increase overall business market share, building and maintaining an organizational structure will help you enhance employee performance.

As a small business owner, your main role is to monitor every employee’s progress around business goals. However, since resources are limited, you have the choice to incorporate technology-driven tools to track and organize the day-to-day workflow in your operations accurately. Accurately monitoring employees’ productivity enhances business transparency, giving you the exact knowledge on which organizational issues need improvement.

Reducing Employee Conflict With Organizational Design

Employee conflict can be poor communication, misunderstandings, and opposing priorities. Moreover, the challenges of having employee conflict include lower productivity, project failure, work disruptions, and termination. Without handling any form of disagreement right away, your small business may not be able to achieve potential customer needs, which can directly impact your business reputation.

By using an organizational design, you may prevent employee conflict obstacles. For example, as you communicate the new small business structure, your staff will focus on their job responsibilities. With that, you provide a clear understanding of the importance of their roles, which makes them hesitate to indulge in conflicts.

Improving Communication 

When your employees know the vitality of healthy communication, you’ll eliminate unnecessary workplace issues and improve overall performance. Once you start promoting a communicative workplace, you create a more vital and engaged team. Therefore, you must create an organizational structure to avoid miscommunication in your small business.

A specific organizational design builds a hierarchy that fosters healthy communication between different departments in your business. For example, as you delegate duties to various teams, workplace staff will know who they need to turn to once an issue arises. In addition, employees don’t need to receive your approval to proceed with one communication issue.

Providing A Greater Sense Of Teamwork 

Teamwork in a small business workplace provides the business owner and the employees the skill to familiarize how to work with one another actively. However, organizing team members can be difficult without a clear job delegation. As your small business suffers from a lack of trust, physical proximity, and optimal conditions, you can’t just demand your team to work together without encountering workplace conflicts.

While acquiring a sense of teamwork is challenging, you can still save your small business by improving the organizational design. For example, you can connect each job role to begin addressing the teamwork obstacles.

Responding To Industry Trends And Marketplace Conditions 

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Responding to periodical trends is beneficial in different ways. Since technology is constantly changing, small business owners must continuously engage customers to sustain market relevancy. By aligning organizational goals with industry trends, businesses can develop results.

Changing market preferences may cause product or service declination. In addition, trends will allow you to develop a reliable system to discover multiple sources of change. Therefore, if you want to adapt to ever-changing market trends, you must sustain high-quality services.  

Attracting Growth Opportunities

When an entrepreneur launches a business, the main goal is to build a reputable brand and eventually grow. However, growth doesn’t happen overnight. Indeed, change requires patience, hard work, and dedication.

That said, it allows small businesses to attract investors and expand opportunities. To attract growth opportunities, redesigning existing organizational design is beneficial. This strategy keeps both employers and employees compelled to long-term business goals.

Key Takeaway On Organizational Design

As a small business owner, you should look for ways to stay relevant in the industry. Restructuring organizational design helps you respond to industry trends, reduce workplace conflict, and boost staff productivity. Therefore, incorporate a new organizational structure to increase overall business sales performance.  

 

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Small Business Locations: 7 Questions to Ask

You’ve made your business idea a reality and now you’re ready to set up shop, and choose small business locations. For many businesses, location can make or break your business’ success. It determines how many customers will enter your store, have a pleasant experience, and ultimately keep coming back to spend money. It’s important to know that not only is your choice in the building itself influential, but also the neighborhood and city surrounding it. To prevent choosing the wrong place to plant roots for your precious business, think about all of these factors.

1. Is this area in good economic health?

When a city is in an ideal economic state, it’s likely a good place to run a business. When there are ample job opportunities in the area, available homes on the market are getting snatched up quickly, and consumers are spending money, your business has a better chance of financial success. The amount of businesses operating in the area is also a good indication of economic potential.

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2. What are the location’s demographics in terms of small business locations?

Think about the product or service you’re offering and your target market. Are you marketing to middle-aged parents? Or are you targeting the single millennial crowd? If you’re trying to attract parents, you’ll want to choose a location with a high percentage of families. For a single millennial population, you might look toward a city with predominantly young, single professionals. You’ll also want to consider demographics when hiring your ideal employees.

3. Can you afford this location?

It’s crucial that you determine whether or not you can afford the costs of operating your business before choosing a permanent location. Aside from the cost of living in a given area, the building or storefront itself will have its own operating costs. These range from rent to utilities to property taxes and more. Your ability to afford the location will directly affect the prices of your products or service, impacting whether or not customers will be able to afford to shop here.

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4. Are there zoning requirements and ordinances to be aware of regarding small business locations?

Zoning requirements limit the number or types of businesses that are allowed to operate within a specific area. In other words, some properties will not permit you to run a business from them because they’re in a residential zone rather than a commercial one. On top of that, there are many regulations that small business owners need to abide by in order to operate legally. Check in with the local government and neighboring businesses as well to cover all of your bases.

5. What are the nearby businesses?

On one hand, neighboring businesses can bring the right customer into your store. For example, if your business sells apparel for babies and toddlers, having a daycare or toy store nearby might bring residual traffic past your store. On the other hand, adjacent businesses can be an obstacle. If they’re selling a similar product or service, especially at a cheaper price point, your business might be in trouble. Analyze the surrounding area carefully before signing a lease.

6. Is this location accessible?

How easy is it to drive to your store? Is there a direct path from a main road? Is there heavy traffic in the area? Is the parking lot easy to park in? All of these questions are important to ask when defining your store’s accessibility. In addition to making sure the location is accessible, make sure it’s easy to find as well. Signs should be well lit and visible from the main road, free of obstructions. Clean up landscaping and remove any obstacles to make the experience convenient for customers.

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7. Is this a safe area for small business locations?

You likely don’t want to take up permanent residence in an area with frequent thefts or any other crimes. Functionally and aesthetically, it may be the perfect building to market your offerings, but an area prone to vandalism or theft could cost you a lot of money down the road. Find out if there is a security system established for the building or if the building has a designated team to protect the building.

Your success as a small business owner hinges on the location you choose. For the best chances of drawing in your target audience and making a profit, take every small detail into consideration to find the perfect location for your small business.

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