5 Ways to Keep Improving Your Business and Why It Matters

13 November 2025

Small, consistent improvements build stronger teams, healthier margins, and more resilient operations over time. The following practical ideas focus on clear, actionable steps you can implement immediately. These five priorities are supported by evidence-based tactics, useful resources, and quick checks to help you and your team make meaningful progress.

Why You Should Keep Improving Your Business

In today’s fast-changing market, continuous improvement is essential not only to survive but to thrive. Businesses that commit to ongoing enhancement build stronger foundations, adapt more quickly to challenges, and unlock new opportunities for growth. By regularly refining your operations, engaging your team, and focusing on customer needs, you create a resilient organisation that can weather uncertainty and outperform competitors. This proactive mindset drives better employee morale, sharper productivity, and healthier margins, making your business more sustainable and rewarding for everyone involved.

• Boosting employee morale: simplifying work, cutting friction and showing staff their ideas matter improves wellbeing and retention. The CIPD’s engagement guidance shows the link between good work design and performance.

• Staying compliant with regulation: rules and reporting expectations change; regular review of processes reduces regulatory risk and unexpected costs. Government guidance and business support programmes help keep SMEs up to date.

• Improving productivity: small process changes or targeted training can raise output without extra headcount. UK-specific advice on productivity and management capability is increasingly available through Growth Hubs and sector initiatives .

• Enhancing cost-effectiveness: removing waste and automating repetitive tasks lowers unit costs and improves margins. Practical guides to business process automation explain where to start and what to expect[^5Improvement doesn’t need a major programme or consultant. A clear approach, repeated regularly, will do more than an occasional big change..

Improvement doesn’t need a major programme or consultant. A clear approach, repeated regularly, will do more than an occasional big change.

Improving Your Business: 5 Ways to Try

1. Set Clear & Measurable Goals

Goals focus effort. The trick is to make them SMART — specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound. For small businesses, that might mean converting a soft aim like “improve customer service” into a concrete target: reduce average complaint resolution time from 72 to 24 hours within six months and achieve a post-resolution satisfaction score of 4.2/5.

Practical steps

• Hold a short goal-setting workshop with team leads to translate strategy into 3–6 month targets.

• Use one dashboard (even a single spreadsheet) to track the few measures that matter.

• Review progress weekly and adapt actions, not the goal, when circumstances change.

Useful reading: Federation of Small Businesses guidance on writing SMART goals provides clear examples for SMEs.

2. Listen to Employees

Those on the frontline see waste, customer friction and safety risks long before leaders do. Listening in a structured way gives you ideas and buys goodwill.

Simple feedback loop

• Run short, frequent pulse employee surveys (two questions max) and share results with staff within a week.

• Hold monthly improvement huddles where teams propose and test small changes using quick experiments.

• Adopt a “you tried it” policy: where suggestions aren’t feasible, explain why and offer alternatives.

Evidence from CIPD and Engage for Success shows that engaged staff drive productivity and innovation; measurement without action is the common failure point, so follow-through matters.

3. Streamline Your Processes

Operations that were efficient in year one often become cluttered over time. Streamlining means mapping the end-to-end process, identifying non-value steps and removing or automating them.

A practical five-step route:

1. Map the current process from customer request to delivery.
2. Identify delays, duplication and rework.
3. Prioritise fixes with the biggest return and easiest implementation.
4. Pilot the change on one team or product.
5. Measure outcome and scale successes.

Automation is not always tech first: reassigning tasks, simplifying forms and eliminating duplicate approvals can cut lead times dramatically. For firms ready to automate, Xero and Workday offer accessible overviews of where automation delivers most value. Independent consultants and local Growth Hubs can help with practical implementation and funding advice.

4. Use Sales Incentives Wisely

Incentives work when they align with the business’s values and profitable behaviours. Mis-designed schemes encourage short-term wins at the expense of long-term customer value.

Design principles

• Reward profit, not just volume. Use margin-based sales incentives rather than pure revenue targets.

• Combine individual and team targets to encourage cooperation.

• Keep schemes simple to understand and easy to earn.

Test incentive changes on a single region or product before rolling out nationally. Listen to sales teams about what motivates them, but couple that with clear guardrails so incentive payouts don’t undermine customer or compliance outcomes.

5. Focus on the Customer Experience

Customers judge your business by the end-to-end experience, not isolated contact points. Good CX improves retention, reduces cost-to-serve and leads to more predictable revenue.

Start with these practical diagnostics

• Map the customer journey and rate each touchpoint for speed, clarity and emotion.

• Gather quick post-contact feedback (one-click survey) and aggregate monthly.

• Identify three “moments of truth” that matter most to customers and focus improvement activity there.

Leading CX research emphasises balancing technology with human empathy; organisations that get that balance right tend to win in competitive markets.

Extra levers that make these five ideas stick

People and processes are the foundation; technology and governance accelerate results.

Leadership and culture

• Make improvement a regular board agenda item with one owner and clear measures.

• Celebrate small wins publicly; visible progress is the fuel for further change.

Capability and learning

• Invest in short, practical training: process mapping, basic data skills and customer insight.

• Use apprenticeships or government training incentives where appropriate to grow skills affordably.

External support

• Local Growth Hubs, LEPs and trade bodies offer free diagnostics and funding support for productivity projects.

• Use authoritative sources (CIPD for people, GOV.UK for regulation, sector trade bodies for technical standards) to avoid reinventing the wheel.

Quick checklist to start this month

• Pick one SMART goal for the next 90 days and assign an owner.

• Run a two-question pulse survey and act on the top three themes.

• Map one high-frequency process and identify two steps to remove or automate.

• Review your current sales incentive and check it rewards margin over volume.

• Ask three customers what one change would make them more likely to recommend you.

Summing it Up

Improvement is less about upheaval and more about disciplined, regular attention to what’s in front of you. Set clear goals, listen to the people doing the work, make processes simpler, motivate sales in the right way and make customer experience a board priority. These five actions, practiced consistently, will reduce risk, lift productivity and make running the business more enjoyable for everyone involved.

Header image by: Blake Wisz at Unsplash

Further Reading

• CIPD. Employee engagement and motivation factsheet. https://www.cipd.org/uk/knowledge/factsheets/engagement-factsheet/

• CIPD. Unlocking business improvement: Overcoming obstacles to workplace productivity growth (policy paper). https://www.cipd.org/globalassets/media/knowledge/knowledge-hub/reports/unlocking-business-improvement_tcm18-102544.pdf

• Xero. Business Process Automation: Streamline your workflows. https://www.xero.com/uk/guides/business-automation/

• Workday. Business Process Automation: The complete guide. https://blog.workday.com/en-gb/business-process-automation-the-complete-guide.html

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