6 Suggestions to Improve Your Company’s Performance

In a constantly evolving business landscape, leaders must actively search for ways to stay competitive, increase profitability, and attract talent—all while meeting customers' expectations. New technology, legislative changes, and disruptions in production present growth opportunities when you're prepared to respond and take action.

Understanding company performance and its contributing factors is essential for new and established businesses. By strategically addressing areas for improvement, you can navigate market changes and disruptions to position the company for long-term success. Continuous improvement is more than a suggestion—it's the secret to achieving the company's full potential. Read on to explore six suggestions to improve company performance.

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Company performance defined 

Company performance refers to the level at which a company achieves its goals. For instance, a company might evaluate performance based on achieving goals like generating a profit after covering costs for the year or retaining 80 percent of employees over a certain period. 

However, company performance also depends on intangibles—factors that sometimes prove difficult to measure—such as customer loyalty or a stellar reputation within your industry. Learning about different strategies to improve company performance can help you decide which methods work best for you.

How to improve company performance

Improving performance involves evaluating key areas in your company, including your employees, managers and senior leadership, operations and processes, and work culture. The following methods for enhancing company performance might help you:

• Identify company strengths and weaknesses

• Build a better leadership team

• Streamline operations

• Increase employee satisfaction

• Set better business goals and make smarter decisions

• Develop a skilled and knowledgeable workforce

1. Conduct a SWOT analysis.

Improving performance at your company starts with a SWOT analysis, which identifies your company's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Conducting this analysis can help you make better business decisions and develop better goals and strategies. 

To conduct a SWOT analysis to evaluate your overall business performance, consider using the following (or similar) definitions:

• Strengths: Areas where your company excels (examples: strong online presence, solid customer base)

• Weaknesses: Areas for improvement in your company (examples: low marketing budget, high employee turnover)

• Opportunities: Circumstances that you might use to your advantage (examples: trending demand from a new market audience, emerging customer service technology) 

• Threats: Circumstances that might jeopardize your company (examples: a new competitor in your market space, economic downturn caused by inflation) 

2. Enhance leadership and management practices. 

Employees perform better when they have good leaders and managers. To enhance leadership and management practices in your company, consider these tips:

• Encourage good communication by encouraging your leaders and managers to practice empathy and active listening. 

• Establish a culture of accountability by setting clear expectations and consequences.

• Spark motivation by allowing managers to offer employee incentives and recognition.

• Prevent micromanagement by discouraging perfectionism and encouraging delegation. 

• Prioritize continuous learning by supporting leadership development programs. 

Read more: Your Guide to Charismatic Leadership

3. Streamline operational processes.

Streamlining processes within your organization helps make your operations more efficient. To help streamline company operations, utilize process audits and automation.

Conduct regular process audits. 

Conducting regular process audits helps identify operational problems and find their causes. Once you've identified these operational areas of concern, you can visualize and design workflows to improve efficiency. 

Automate processes with technology. 

You can use computer software to take over many repetitive tasks in your company, a practice known as automation. In addition to making company operations more efficient and saving companies money, automation can offer the following benefits:

• Better threat detection and response

• Enhanced customer service

• Greater employee satisfaction and productivity

• Improved decision-making

• Less energy consumption/increased sustainability 

Areas where you might use automation include:

• Claims processing

• Email management

• Facility management

• Hiring and onboarding

• Marketing and sales

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4. Prioritize employee wellbeing.

Employee well-being and work performance go hand in hand. According to Gallup, employees who feel happy at work perform better than those who don't, stay at their jobs longer, and take less sick leave [1]. All of these factors can affect a company's financial success. To elevate employee wellbeing at your company, consider these tips:

Create and implement employee wellness programs

Employee wellness programs promote the health and well-being of workers, and they come in many varieties. Some ideas for employee wellness programs include:

• Chronic disease management

• Exercise and fitness

• Meditation or mindfulness

• Nutrition and weight loss

• Preventative health screenings

• Smoking cessation

Promote a positive work culture

A positive work culture can help you attract and keep good employees. To help promote a more positive work culture at your company, consider a few important strategies: 

• Create a mission statement that reflects the company's beliefs and values and encourage management to embody the mission.

• Develop a diverse and inclusive work environment through hiring and training practices.

• Focus on creating a more collaborative, empowering, and flexible leadership team.  

5. Align goals and key performance indicators (KPIs)

Key performance indicators (KPIs) refer to the measurements used to evaluate company performance. The following practices can help you successfully align company goals and KPIs:

• Set SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound) goals.

• Define KPIs that measure progress toward your goals and track them.

• Evaluate your outcomes and make changes as needed. 

6. Embrace a learning culture.

A company culture that incorporates continual learning provides many performance-boosting benefits. Some of the more common benefits include: 

• Attraction and retention of top talent

• Higher employee engagement

• Greater innovation

• Increased upskilling and knowledge-sharing 

To make learning an integral part of your company culture, consider conducting a skills gap analysis to determine what types of training you need. Encourage your middle managers and senior leadership to set an example for employees and learn new skills. Promote a culture of learning throughout the employee lifecycle, from job interviews to resignations, and involve your employees in creating their own personalized learning and development plans. 

Read more: Fostering a Learning Culture within Your Company

Your next steps on Coursera

In today's dynamic business world, companies must continuously adapt to stay ahead. Build critical employee job skills today with Coursera for Business. 

Promote leadership skills throughout your organization by developing employees who innovate and inspire. With the Leadership Academy from Coursera, employees can learn the skills needed to lead your business into the future. Through Coursera for Business, you’ll build effective managers at every level with beginner and advanced-level leadership content, including 40+ SkillSets to drive soft skill proficiency across the entire organization.