3 Steps to Building an Effective Lean Team for Your Small Business

Teamit highlights the benefits of building lean teams in the workplace. From improved efficiency, better resource management, to stronger working relations, companies are now shifting to lean processes to get ahold of these business improvements. In this article, get to know the 3 steps you should follow to kickstart creating an effective team for your small business. Before that, let’s find out the definition of lean.

Lean Management Principles

The concept of Lean Management has taken businesses by storm. Its currently being used all around the world by several successful companies like FedEx and Nike. This simple yet powerful principle stands on three points:

1. Delivering value from your customer’s perspective;
2. Eliminating things that don’t add merit; and
3. Improving continuously

It was originally applied to manufacturing processes to maximize output while minimizing costs. Through time, business owners realized that these principles can also be applied in other aspects of the business—particularly with creating dynamic teams.

What Makes an Effective Team

In 2012, Google launched Project Aristotle, a study on what makes an effective team. They measured different aspects of individuals from their strongest teams, intending to find what makes them work together so well. In the end, the results coincide with what most great managers already know: great teams empathize and listen to each other. Rather than delving deep into the characteristics of each team member, how they all interact with one another should be the greater focus.

With this in mind, the lean team concept for small businesses comes much more appealing. Collaborating and streamlining tasks while focusing on the continuous improvement of all team members leads to the business’ significant growth.

3 Steps to Building Lean Teams for Small Businesses

Now that we’ve tackled why having lean teams are great for small businesses, it’s time to discuss how. Get started with these 3 key steps:

Step 1: Hire Deliberately with Growth in Mind

Before hiring additional employees if your team is still missing a member or two, make sure to first set comprehensive job descriptions for the whole team. These should encompass all tasks required to keep the company running and more importantly, growing. Given this, set tasks may be subject to change depending on the company’s needs. Communicate this clearly to candidates, making sure that they are aware of the nature of the job.

When looking for extra team members, choose generalists over specialists. Since the business is still growing, it is beneficial to have cross-functional expertise that brings valuable inputs for the company’s success.

Step 2: Upskill Your Team 

Hiring is not the only way to get talented team members. Enrolling your current team in training sessions is another way to give them extra skillsets for the business. This is also a good way to increase employee engagement and is aligned with lean management’s principle of continuous improvement.

Aside from seminars, which may be costly at this point in the business, holding brown bag sessions and streaming free educational videos are other upskilling hacks that won’t break the bank.

Step 3: Automate for Efficiency

Once you’ve hired your ideal effective team to drive small business growth, it’s time to create systems in place to maximize productivity. This is where automation comes in. 

To eliminate processes that don’t add value to the customer, automate repetitive tasks. This way, your team’s time and energy will be spent on things only they can do—meeting with potential customers, optimizing your production plant, or designing your next big product.

When selecting which tasks to automate, identify those that don’t directly benefit customers yet take so much time from your work hours. Think of your monthly payroll computation, financial statements, and legal paperwork. Instead, software solutions like MPM Payroll with Small-to-Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in mind, could handle these tasks for you.

To recap, all you need to kickstart building your lean team is to:

1. Hire Deliberately for Growth
2. Upskill Your Team
3. Automate for Efficiency

Let these steps guide you in building an effective team that will push your small business to further growth.

To discover how MPM Payroll can support your business’ growth by handling your HR and Payroll grunt work, click the button below to learn more.