Achieve success through your People.
In the world of business, your employees are both your greatest asset and your biggest challenge. Successfully attracting, developing, and retaining top talent doesn’t just happen—it demands a deliberate investment of time and resources.
Conversely, neglecting to address performance issues or other challenges with your team members can erode both your team’s effectiveness and the culture you’re working to build, leading to potentially significant consequences.
“SAS helped me establish the strategy and plan to start and grow my business.”
— Moana Williams, Owner Bodyfix, Christchurch
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Getting the structure and culture right.
Revamping your business structure, team, and culture to align with your company's values and goals can be a game-changer.
Given the ever-evolving business landscape and shifting customer demands, adapting is necessary to maintain competitive edge. Without the right resources or skills within your team, initiating these changes can be tough. Whether the adjustments are minor or significant, a project-oriented approach can facilitate a quicker and more effective transformation.
Aligning your organisational structure, roles, and personnel with your core values and objectives is crucial for enhancing productivity and achieving desired outcomes, enabling better management of individual performance and contributions.
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Hiring and Firing
The decisions to hire, retain, or part ways with employees are crucial to your business's success.
The principle 'hire slowly, fire quickly' highlights the importance of a well-considered hiring process, which should involve a clear need, a thorough interview process, reference checks, and suitable trial or probation periods.
Similarly, letting go of an employee should be done correctly and promptly, especially if they are not meeting expectations during a trial period. Keeping unproductive or unprofessional employees in a role can prevent a more capable individual from thriving.
Embedding this approach into your organisational culture, rewarding performance, and holding employees accountable for underperformance reflects best practice in business.
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Induction and Training
Effective induction and ongoing training for new employees is crucial for their contribution and retention within your business.
Small to medium-sized enterprises often handle this poorly due to limited resources and the belief that 'staff can learn on the job.'
The downside of this approach is that employees may learn inefficient or incorrect methods, leading to reduced productivity, production issues, or customer service complaints.
Investing in thorough induction that covers the business, its culture, the team, and their roles will enhance productivity, performance, and retention.
By setting your staff up for success from the start, you maximise their potential as your greatest asset.
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Performance Management and Remuneration
Performance management focuses on assessing staff performance, providing feedback, and setting goals for development and improvement. These evaluations, alongside the business's performance, should guide your compensation decisions.
Effective performance management starts with clearly defined roles, detailed job descriptions, and key performance indicators that outline the expected outcomes and results for each role. This should be backed by induction and training programmes that ensure employees have the skills and tools needed to meet their performance objectives.
The performance review process should be designed to be structured and thorough, evaluating achievements and identifying any performance gaps that may require further training or strategies to address significant underperformance.
Compensation decisions should be influenced by individual performance, business outcomes, employment market trends, and the broader economic climate.
A well-implemented performance management process can significantly enhance employee performance, support informed decisions about your workforce, and ensure that high performers are recognised and retained, while underperformers are either developed or moved on.
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HR Policies and Systems
Ensuring that staff and management have easy access to the business’s staff policies is essential.
These policies should align with the business’s mission and values and support the desired company culture.
They should be referenced in employment contracts and regularly updated to reflect the business’s current operations and any changes in legislation.
Your policies should be thorough, covering areas like health and safety standards, drug and alcohol policies and testing (if necessary), sick leave guidelines, dress code requirements, holiday leave conditions, cell phone use, use of company vehicles or property, and any staff purchasing privileges etc.
Many businesses either lack these policies or have outdated versions that are not effectively communicated, leading to confusion and potential conflict with employees. Enforcing these policies becomes difficult in such situations.
Leveraging technology to manage and make these policies accessible is best practice and will greatly contribute to effective employee management.
Our Services
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Change & Change Management
Understanding the need for and embracing that change can be challenging and difficult to execute. Doing the same thing and expecting different results, is not the answer.
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People – Successful Hiring & Firing
Building successful teams requires you to have clearly defined roles and responsibilities and a thorough recruitment process. Attracting and hiring great people, should not be something that happens by luck.
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Finance & Money
Knowing your income, your costs, your margins and the key variables that drive those is critical. You can’t control, influence, or change what you don’t know or understand.