Written by Kirsten Goode and inspired by a DAS law blog, a Forbes article, Google and my own ideas and ingenuity.

Spring is here! The temperature is heating up, days are getting longer. Life is beginning to wake up from its winter hibernation, with flowers bursting into bloom and trees coming back to life. Mother Nature has performed her winter cleansing ritual and everything is starting to look fresh and new again.

This is the time of year that seems to energise people into action. Whether its expanding their activities, renovating their house and yard or having a fresh look at their business. Spring seems to be the time for rejuvenation and renewal.

With that in mind, its a great time use that renewed energy and enthusiasm for life to take a look and discover ways you can Spring clean your business.

Take some time out to scour your website and look for content that is out of date or doesn’t line up with your business’s current brand identity or objectives.

Things like;

• updating your teams profile page to add newly acquire staff, academic achievements or work skills,
• checking all your web links,
• removing blogs that are no longer relevant or contain out of date information,
• refreshing your homepage content to better harness Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and,
• changing your homepage to reflect current webpage trends or styling.

If you haven’t updated your website in a while, chances are there is something that needs to be changed.

I know its a time consuming task that takes away from your revenue generating activities. But writing a business and marketing plan is essential for business planning and business success and something that should be done every year. With the first half of the year well and truly behind us the and the end of the year fast approaching, now is a great time to be proactive and start building a plan for the coming year.

Businesses constantly develop and change, and yours is no exception. So as your business changes, so too should your business plan. You should reflect back on the year that was and look at your business, your industry and your environment. Look for the changes that have come about in the last year and what opportunities they may bring for your business. To do this you need to determine;

• how has your business coped with the current environment?
• what mistakes have you made and what changes would help you for the next time.
• have you added or removed products, changed your pricing, or has your target market changed?
• what the current industry trends are and what your peers and competitors are doing right now?

Asking yourself these questions can help your build an excellent plan and an agile business.

A plan to rejuvenate your marketing activity should always be incorporated into your business planning.

Digital marketing is a complicated beast! Constantly changing and morphing from one trend to another. Social Media algorithms change constantly. This means that what worked for you 12 months ago is not necessarily going to work for you now. Re-educate yourself and re-engineer your business through the following:

• Invest in social media if you haven’t already.
• Take a few short courses to update your skills and help you keep on trend with your content.
• Research new marketing trends and new social media channels on the rise. See how they might assist with communicating to potential customers.
• Automate tasks to reduce your marketing workload. Set up email marketing campaigns to pre-empt customer queries, or question and answer sheets for those most commonly asked.
• Revisit your brand. Is your brand logo or style out of date? Are your colours still contemporary? And does your brand personality still fit with the size of your business and your target markets
• Analyse the data. Look over the last year and see where your peeks and troughs are. Also check you insights to see what content engaged your audience and what didn’t.
• Go to a conference or trade show, either virtually or in person if circumstance allow.

It has always been crucial for businesses to keep abreast of what’s happening within their industry. However, the opportunity to network with your peers and learn about developments in your industry at conferences and events has been severely restricted over the past 18 months. Your ability to properly keep ahead of the game has been difficult.

This is where conducting a thorough competitor analysis can come in handy. Competitor analysis is an essential part of any good business plan and something you should always take some time to perform. To see what you can do to learn more about your competitors go to tip #1 in our 10 tips for small business story.

These last few years have been an ever changing environment due to Covid-19, especially for businesses. They have had to adapt to employees working from home, the exponential growth of on-line shopping and how to cope with health and safety in the work place. As a result, there is a growing need to ensure your work contracts reflect the changing needs of the business.

Remote and hybrid work look set to stay in our post covid-19 world. Therefore businesses will have to manage the expectations of any new employee by ensuring their work contracts cater for the changing needs of our new normal. Some of the questions you should be asking yourself are;

• Do your work contracts still align to the jobs requirements?
• Are they up to date with any employment law changes made in the last 12 months?
• How many days per week can your employees work from home?
• Do they now have a digital component to their role?

However your workplace looks like now, you must ensure your work contracts reflect the conditions you have set for employment. It’s time to think through your employment risks and mitigate them wherever possible.

Now is also a great time to ensure your health and safety policies reflect any new requirements you have put in place. Check your policies around working from home, IT, confidentiality and use of company devices outside of the office.

Getting this right not only reduces your risk of Covid-19 in the workplace, it could also reduce your risk for other commonly spread illness that cause absent employees and increased workloads on your staff.

Continuing on with the topic of employee wellbeing. Now is a great time to take a fresh look at your employees employment history including;

• how much annual leave they currently have and how much sick leave they have taken.
• what measures have you got in place to ensure that your people take all of their holidays this year?

If working from home, it is really important to ensure they are getting that separation from home and work.

Rolling over holidays to the following year is acceptable, but certainly not best practice. Therefore should be avoided wherever possible. Poor planning can leave you struggling with too many staff on leave at the same time. Staff not taking holidays can also lead to a whole host of issues including burn out, illness, stress, and damage to morale.

Be pro-active. Ensure you keep on top of all staff leave and encourage staff to use their holiday entitlement by the end of each year.

Every facet of your business has a process. From simple work routines like screening emails to critical endeavors like managing finances. No matter how simple the task may be, it’s important to always ask yourself “Is there a more efficient way to do this?”

Think about your current processes and which ones are in need of some improvement. Ask your team;

• what tasks they are repeating over and over again,
• what’s taking up most of their time,
• what issues do they have that you might not yet be aware of
• Is there an easier way to do these tasks? Or,
• is there new software you could introduce to make it more efficient.

Once you have determined what tasks could be improved, set aside some time towards creating a strategy for improvement. This should be done in consultation with the employees that perform the tasks. They could even help with the development of the new process, the drafting of the new communication or the research into which software to invest in to best suit your business needs.

The same goes for external processes as well. Use this spring clean as an opportunity to clean up the way your company communicates with its customers or outside agencies. In other words, what changes can you make in your communication that will reduce the number of queries or complaints you receive?

Most business tasks are individual to every business and staff need to be properly trained in order to perform the task correctly. After developing any new process, its always a good idea to document its work flow. This serves to not only ensure every employee is on the same page with every process, it will also ensure any new employees can be quickly and easily trained.

Its not just new processes that could do with a documented workflow. How many times has one of your essential work tasks had to be put on hold because the person that performed them was away? Your existing processes, especially the critical ones, should always be written down so that any staff member can pick up the document and perform the task if necessary.

It’s the one that everyone dreads, too often put into the “too hard” basket or the “I don’t have time for that” shuffle.

Spring is a time when people are energized and enthusiastic an therefore more open to a bit of a clean up. Therefore it’s a good time to set aside a half day for everyone to conduct a tidy up of the office. You could incentivise them by providing lunch and allowing them wear casual clothes.

Before you start, get your staff to make a list of things they think need cleaning. Add your own thoughts to this list and set up a roster of who should clean what and how much time it should take. Use your understanding of your staffs strengths and weaknesses and assign the tasks that fit them best. And don’t just include things you can see. Also take some time looking at your work files and directories and see where they can be streamlined as well.