Do you have a good business practice agenda in your business?

How do you decide what is good business practice for your own business and how are others doing it?

There is a new online tool that has been created for Australian Small Business providing a platform that will enable small to medium businesses to establish their own responsible and sustainable business practice agenda. St. James Ethics Centre and the Council of Small Business Organisations of Australia in collaboration with Australian Businesses, has developed the Good Business Register.

The site is secured by log in and will allow you to build and publish your Responsible Business Practice Profile as a marketing tool that showcases your company’s image and reputation building trust and understanding.

You can print your profile, save it allowing you to use it within any other marketing strategy documents or send or publish the link to stakeholders, customers, suppliers and staff.

Currently this is a free online tool and can be completed incrementally to your time constraints and as your business grows or changes.

The site is based around 5 principles of responsible business practice – Financial sustainability, Inclusive workplace environment, Promoting responsible business through the supply chain, Active engagement with stakeholders and the community, and Minimising the impact of business activities on the environment.

We are all subject to a range of responsibilities and obligations that govern our day-to-day business operations. These obligations define minimum requirements we must meet within our business and information on them is provided within the register. However the register is about encouraging business to go beyond compliance – to be more aspirational than merely complying, and provide you with the platform to showcase this important competitive edge, improving your image and reputation.

Click here to register and use the Good Business Register

Business owners and high-level managers suffer burn out all too commonly, because they simply work too hard too long.
For many it becomes a case of feeling that taking any time off would be a luxury, and there is simply too much work on the desk to afford such luxuries.
Studies show that taking time off is not a luxury, but a necessity to prevent health issues and burnout and actually increase productivity.

One effective way of reducing working stress and increasing productivity
is to take a ‘working sabbatical’.

Consider taking even just a single week ‘off work’ and going to a retreat holiday location.

This could be local, but is even better if you totally remove yourself geographically. During this sabbatical you can relax in a holiday environment, and yet spend time each day working on the creative and innovative sides of your business.

This concept allows you to put yourself in a different head space, which allows you to begin to think outside of the square and consider concepts you may never even be able to imagine whilst in your work environment.

Imagine sitting on a beach, or in a rainforest reworking your business plan, cash flow projections, new innovation concepts or company structure.

OK maybe you would rather be at this location and not be working at all, but how difficult are you finding working on your business whilst in the office, and are you even taking holidays? How many distractions of the day-to-day workings of your business just keep piling up in front of you causing stress preventing you from being creative and innovative?
Google give their staff 20% of their working time to creative development, whilst 3M give 15%. During this creative time out of the working day the Post-it Note and Scotch tape were invented – now how much business and profit did this generate?

As part of Small Business September I attended a seminar this week that looked at managing disasters in business.

There were many tips given and food for thought chewed over, as this is such an important aspect of business but one often neglected due to pressures of the daily workload or being unsure where to start.

I like to think that I am a fairly good business manager, but it highlighted areas I haven’t really given thought to, and I have 3 areas I need to attend to.

A great point made was to realise that you may be able to carry on business reasonably well with one disaster, but a combination may put too much pressure on without a plan in place.

Whilst small business need to plan for disaster, they may have higher impacts from different types of disaster than big business.

For example a sole trader has a disaster if they are seriously injured, whilst a big business would absorb this.

Some tips to think about when planning:

Secondary supplier arrangements can help manage dependencies.

• Keep a copy of critical contact details in your emergency kit for communication during a disaster.
• Know who is in charge within a chain of command
• Notify stakeholders such as banks, customers, landlords and make arrangements for the delay period.
• Prioritise who you can service to retain core business.
• Check your insurance coverage is relevant to your business and possible scenarios.
• Enable staff to work offsite to offset being cut off from the place of work.
• Each business is different in structure, products and services, so some tips will be more applicable than others.
• There are templates available online that you can use to create your plan so that it is relevant to your own situation.
• Don’t wait for another flood to realise you still haven’t instigated disaster planning, and remember floods are only one type of disaster we can find ourselves experiencing.