A high performance team expects high performance leadership from their coach, writes Mark Jones*. 

Too often when we talk performance, we talk about getting more from our team. But what if our team needed more from us to achieve greater levels of performance?

Sports can teach us a lot about team performance. The coaching staff monitor the team’s performance on the field, plan their training and provide focused feedback to each player to get the most out of them.

A healthy sports team also has players with various strengths, a strong bench and scouts constantly searching for the best new talent coming through the ranks.

Cleaning can be a blood sport
With sham contracting eroding margins, increasing regulations and higher customer expectations, many cleaning operators are finding it hard to hit profitability and grow. Add to this the low cost of entry and growing unskilled worker base and you have ongoing downward price pressures.

Competing on price alone leads to many businesses suffering as much as 50 per cent customer attrition annually. To combat this many companies are rightly turning to specialisation and upskilling their best workers.

Better people = better service
A US survey put poor service as the reason for 55 per cent of non-renewed contracts. Far and away the leading cause of customer attrition. In a business where more than 80 per cent of the cost base is your human resource, investing in their development and tools to support them is money well spent.

This improvement goes straight to your bottom line where each new employee induction has been valued as at least $1000 and the cost of acquiring new customers is around 10 per cent of the value of their annual contract. So we should be aiming for a 10 per cent improvement out of your team to offset any lost margin from price wars.

Keeping good staff
Human resources is not just hiring and firing. It is the art of enhancing the value of your human resource, just as you might invest in other assets for your business.

Too many business owners keep good staff in their current role, scared that if they educate and train them they will leave. In fact, the reverse is true.

*Mark Jones is director of freshops.com.au and a board member of the BSCAA QLD. He can be reached at mark@freshops.com.au.

*This article first appeared in the July/August edition of INCLEAN. Click here to keep reading.