I think one of the largest forms of leverage in business ownership is getting maximum performance out of your workers. People are large variables that can swing either way when it comes to how they perform. I am a person who completely understands efficiency. I look for maximum efficiency in everything I do while still respecting quality. Sometimes even the way I talk, walk and take things out of the refrigerator is done in an extremely efficient manner. I do not like wasting time or effort. Sometimes slowness is not a waste of effort but working on the wrong priority always is.

Efficiency can be a great form of leverage in many situations. Many times, in business, there are many unnecessary inefficiencies in the way people work. I always cringe when I’m at a business and I see workers doing things such as reading books, checking their MySpace account, standing around talking to each other and not servicing customers or completing tasks. Also, a lot of times even if employees are working hard they come to a stop because they find that they do not know how to do a part of their job. This is most likely costing the owner a nice chunk of change each year for these inefficiencies with workers.

This is why I say “Systemize Your Workers.” What does this mean? It means build and document a system for everything that your workers will be doing. Larger companies are good at this. Often they have hundreds to thousands of pages on company policies and procedures. You will see greater productivity and performance when you’ve documented exactly what your employees are to do & not do and you require them to learn and apply all of it.

An example of something that would be in this documentation may be a section on “How to greet customers when they first enter the store” or “How to enter new merchandise into the inventory system.”

There are many strategies and tactics for successfully accomplishing this. It always helps to have the resources of an enterprise size corporation but I’ll focus on small business. We want to create & distribute this documentation in a cost effective way, make it thorough & complete, make it easily understandable and be able to regularly update it in an efficient & economical way.

Technology offers a lot of help with this. Using computers to create, manage and distribute documentation of policies & procedures is the way to go. A lot of people by default would have this typed up on a computer but then would print it out or email it for their distribution. I think a higher leveraged way to go is by utilizing a corporate website or intranet which allows workers to have access to an always updated version of it at work or at home. Utilizing technology like RSS Feeds can enhance this digital system even further. Workers can also print off certain parts of the documentation if they need to.

Using digital multimedia can be a great way to help workers understand and retain policies & procedures. This usually heightens the cost but it is probably worth it for a few parts of the overall system. An example of this would be video of how to properly stock shelves or audio of the proper tone to speak with when pitching a sales script over the phone.

If an average 30 employee small business put $100,000, in one year, into the systemization of its workers then I believe they would see a large ROI that next year.

Bottom line… Systemizing your workers can beef up your bottom line.