Delegating tasks to your staff or hiring a consultant may help you with tasks that will free up your time to work ‘on’ your business rather than ‘in’ it… but you need to ensure the person carrying out the task knows everything required to complete it to your satisfaction – upfront!

Working ‘on’ your business allows you to:

• look for new ways to attract customers
• improve your business system
• monitor staff performance; ensuring your values and guidelines are being followed
• find new products
• analyse and beat the competition
• create new marketing campaigns
• enhance your business image
• find business partners
• and the list goes on

Of course, if you don’t want to work ‘on’ your business, and prefer to work ‘in’ it doing what you love, then delegation is great for handing out the tasks you despise. You may even have staff that would love to do that task and be better at it.

Each task you delegate should be briefly assessed against your employee’s level of skill and ability to carry it out to the level required; you will then feel confident the job is going to be done properly and/or professionally and your employee won’t feel overwhelmed. Make sure you provide ALL the information necessary to perform the task properly, skipping vital bits of information can cause problems and disagreements. Take the time to show your employee what needs to be done. You may think, “Well I might as well do it myself”, but when they get the hang of it, you won’t need to do it anymore, which is one less thing for you to do.

Staff are usually more willing to assist and more capable than given credit for, plus they may feel they are actually contributing to the business  and their  job satisfaction levels will increase, which turn, may produce better quality outputs and customer service.

Delegating helps your business in so many more ways than just giving you time to play golf or go to the gym. It frees up your time to work on the future of your business like:

• updating your system documentation
• establishing or updating a marketing campaign including publicity, website development, internet marketing …
• writing to your existing customers with a special offer to say thank you
• obtaining feedback and incorporating modifications for improvement
• setting up your website or adding information
• and the list goes on

Keep in touch with the needs of your employees, what they like to do, what they are good at. You may have a gem or too already under your roof that will take the load off and do the job pretty well.

Have you every asked your employees:

• Are you doing what you love, if not, what do you love?
• Are there any positions in the business or tasks you would like to do?
• How can I make working here better for you?
• Do you believe I am communicating the importance of your role in the business?
• List 5 things I can do to make it easier for you?
• I would like you to do XYZ would you be interested?
• I have a list of tasks that I would like to delegate, which ones would you be interested in doing?
  

The answers may surprise you!

You don’t have to implement suggestions, but staff can sometimes see the business from a different perspective and have some great insight into what you can do to improve your systems as well as customer satisfaction.

If an employee makes suggestions and they are interested, delegate tasks to include them in the improvement process and I bet  you will see they are much happier and more willing to do more to help.

Have you had an experience as an employer or employee that demonstrates how effective delegating is, please comment below: