Tips for Improving Long-Term Business Strategies

With many companies having a difficult time forecasting future earnings in today's challenging economy, it's more important than ever that businesses develop and implement strategies to ensure their long-term success.

1. Execution IQ

Utilizing execution IQ metrics is a good way for executives to measure performance and evaluate growth potential by aligning their business strategy, organization and talent. Execution IQ is an organization's capacity to identify the most important drivers of their business and how their talent can be best deployed.

According to Axiom Consulting Partners, execution IQ metric can help companies' workforce planning by measuring employee satisfaction and predicting possible turnover rates.

Garret Sheriden, managing partner of Axiom, said the rate of loss of high-performance or high-value employee can be critical to forecasting a businesses' future success.

"Companies tend to look at simple metrics like annual employee turnover, but they often don’t look deep enough to understand if they are losing their most critical employees", Sheriden noted.

2. Shockproof for lasting success

In the new book "Shockproof: How to Hardwire Your Business for Lasting Success," companies found that providing quality over quantity was the key to long-term growth. One customer call center, for example, put too much pressure on their representatives to field questions within three minutes in order to boost their productivity metrics. However, many employees were hanging up on customers in order to meet their quota, which in turn damaged the company's long-term reputation.

Shockproffing helps businesses strike the right balance between customer satisfaction and productivity.

3. Execute, don't plan

One reason why many business strategies are not implemented properly is because many executives are trained to plan, but not execute. According to the Financial Times, business managers often enter the workplace with little real-life experience in implementing a successful business strategy and often delegate the actual work to lower-level employees.

The key to strategy execution lies with all levels of managers who are committed and passionate in making valuable, measurable changes.

4. Anticipate roadblocks

In order for a business strategy to be successfully implemented, managers need to know that things will not always go off with out certain glitches. Executives should execute a strategy knowing that it is a long-term process and that many factors, including negatives and unanticipated ones can come into play over time. Any additional unseen problems need to be dealt with head-on in order to keep the process moving forward. 

--Published Courtesy of Brafton