Thought Leadership | Angelo Zanetti and Elemental

We joined EOA at the beginning of 2021 with the intention to gather new insights into scaling a business and make the necessary changes to facilitate better business practices and faster growth.

So far it’s been an amazing journey, connecting with like-minded business owners and coaches, coupled with the learnings and takeaways from the learning days and accountability groups. We’ve learnt loads and implemented quite a few key changes in our business that are yielding results.

We’ve highlighted a few of the bigger learnings and changes as follows:

1. Staff feedback meetings:

A really valuable process we put into place was to conduct staff feedback meetings. The idea and concept behind these are that each and every staff member may have valuable insights that we are not aware of. These insights can allow us to make small changes that can have a significant impact on our business, our processes and our clients’ businesses.

We adopt the stop, start and keep methodology which simply allows us to understand what we should stop doing, what we should start doing and what we should keep on doing, that is really working well.

Coupled with this we ask for feedback in terms of what they think can be done to improve our business and our clients’ businesses.

You’d be surprised about what feedback they give and how valuable these insights can be. We’ve received key feedback and made changes based on this, whichhad an immediate positive effect.

2. Values exercise:

We never had values defined previously in our business. We know values are important but we didn’t know how to define them, nor did we want to put down some random values that were not really what we were about.

Luckily for us, part of the scaling up journey is an exercise to do just that.

Using this exercise and approach from the EOA learning day, we were able as co-founders to figure out and define our values, which really hit home.

We use these values for hiring new staff, as we only want staff who match our values to be part of the Elemental team. We also use our values as part of our monthly scoring (more on that below).

3. Scoring

Scoring of staff is something that we have implemented based on the job scorecard system. We have adapted and customised the structure to better suit our needs and provide us with the insights that matter to us.

We measure our staff based on two aspects:

i. How they perform their duties and communicate

ii. How they measure up to our values and whether they are living our values

The outcome of the monthly (we found this to be the best interval) scoring gives us, as management, insights into areas where someone may be lacking and where assistance is needed. The goal of the exercise is to provide positive feedback and to help all staff achieve great scores, through continuous improvement, training and guidance.

As the saying goes “You can’t manage what you can’t measure”; which is really true in this case. Having access to accurate data allows us to make decisions and steps to remedy problem areas.

We look forward to continuing this journey with EOA, ultimately leading to the greater success of our business and reaching our full potential. If you have questions or comments on any of these points please leave a comment below and we can take the conversation further.

Written by Angelo Zanetti | elemental.co.za?