Being a sustainable business means more than just recycling and using renewable energy. It means laying the groundwork for future employee and customer growth. Sustainable scaling allows you to scale up or down as needed and considers your people, processes and technologies. This is important for the future of your business because it prepares you to deal with unexpected changes.
Three attributes of a sustainable organization are:
- Continuity or the ability to consistently repeat processes
- Availability or the ability to adapt to sudden changes
- Scalability or the ability to scale up or down as needed
As a business leader, you should prioritize sustainable scaling over rapid, unsustainable growth because rapid shifts aimed at addressing a current problem without due diligence can backfire later and become a blot on your organization’s growth story.
What fuels a sustainable business?
Platform for growth, integration, and automation
All your business solutions should connect to a central hub and act as a platform for growth to improve productivity and efficiency. Instead of focusing on the features and functionality of each solution, think about the capabilities of the combined solutions.
Because they consolidate data, solutions that successfully integrate can be a long-term asset for your organization. However, some executives overlook this, resulting in a mishmash of incompatible technologies.
Automating time-consuming and repetitive manual processes lowers costs, improves efficiency, reduces errors, and boosts customer and employee satisfaction. Make sure you don’t get left behind in an age when proactive businesses are automating their systems to achieve sustainable growth.
Updated documentation
A simple and powerful automated documentation system can help your employees work more effectively. It allows your employees to modify or revise existing templates in the document management system to comply with changing regulations. This helps manage and create business documents on time with greater accuracy.
Make sure the solution has the following features:
- Organized documentation
- Relationship mapping (link related items so that you have access to all the information you require)
- Safe password management
- Enterprise-level security including multi-factor authentication
- Capability to integrate with existing technologies at your business
Security Awareness Training
Your employees require thorough and ongoing security awareness training to deal with the rapid changes happening around them. Through self-paced, short learning modules, every employee must be made aware that even minor errors can snowball into a disastrous security disaster for the company.
The return on investment (ROI) on security awareness training manifests in better decision-making and employees who respond quickly to cyber threats, saving your company from data breaches, reputational damage and potentially costly lawsuits.
The more knowledgeable your employees are and the longer they stay, the better they serve your customers. So, never be afraid to invest in human resources training because it yields a high return on investment (preventing even a single phishing attempt can save your company thousands).
Keep your technology up-to-date
Overlooking even one vulnerability could escalate into something severe. Continuous vulnerability scanning can assist you in detecting and remediating vulnerabilities while freeing up your team’s time to focus on other tasks.
If not addressed promptly, out-of-date legacy systems might become your growth story’s biggest faux pas — the consequences of which can have a significant financial impact on your organization.
Remember, outdated systems expose your network to hackers, lower overall productivity and could even push your most valuable employees out the door because they are tired of dealing with shoddy systems that make their jobs hard.
Partner for success
If you fail at being a sustainable business, you risk losing your employees and customers alike. It’s time to abandon rapid acceleration in favor of sustainable growth that can help you achieve customer/employee satisfaction and long-term success.
A managed service provider (MSP) like us can help you achieve your goals. Feel free to contact us for a no-obligation consultation on ways to make your company more sustainable.
Additionally, to learn more about the topic, download our infographic “7 Ways to Make Your Organization Scalable” by clicking here.
