Small business owners have probably looked at the employee structure of larger businesses and taken inspiration to design their own. It’s quite simple at first, you hire junior employees that will be the bulk of your workforce, then supervisors, managers, heads of departments and then the C-suite. It’s not that complicated and you have all the important roles filled. However a really strong employee structure will ensure that there are employees that work in a specialized capacity. They’re not quite middle-management and they’re not quite C-suite rank either. They are treated as high-level employees but they solely answer to the CEO or if the boss permits, the other C-suite roles too. These employees will be financial advisors, risk analysts, legal experts and last but not least researchers. Most business owners understand the first three but the value of researchers is not quite as evident. But before you overlook them, you should know that researchers play a crucial role in all levels of your business. Here’s where they could be hired to work.
By a different name
Researchers don’t necessarily arrive to your interview desk with that particular title. Internal auditors are also researchers, they are professionals in scoping the inner workings of your business and making sure everything is above board. Even if a CEO is playing by the book, the employees around him might not be. It’s therefore crucial that every CEO sees auditors as people that will help them. It’s common in the cultural landscape of business, to see auditors as people trying to find fault in your business where there is none. They’re not out to ‘get’ you, they’re actually trying to warn you of things like corruption, money laundering, tax evasion, false reports and under the table dealings of any kind. These kinds of researchers will warn you of danger to your position as the leader, not making it worse.
Auditors should be hired independently. For many businesses, auditors are not part of the employee list and their roles are not required in a permanent capacity. Even large businesses and multinational corporations hire financial auditors from the outside to come and inspect their internal affairs. It’s not just because of impartiality, although this is an important reason, it’s more so because they are highly specialized and can devote entire teams to one aspect of your business. It’s a good idea to hire some auditors but in reality, auditing takes a long time and it can only be effectively done by using a team of auditors. Their value to your business running as it should is highly understated.
Studying your own history
When you look at large businesses like Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and Ford, they have the usual row of incredibly talented C-suite employees and workers. They would not be where they are today if they didn’t hire the best in their respective industries. However, the employees that almost never get any of the limelight yet play a massively important role are the data researchers or data analysts. These specialists work in the business administration department of a business. They are tasked with studying the performance of your business in terms of goals set, goals met and then clearly identifying what improvements can be made in the future.
Data analysts require a fluid work environment as they will be looking over and studying multiple reports from all departments. If you do store some or all of your data in hard drives you really need to transfer everything to a cloud system. If you are thinking about this, look at this Online Computers’ Support whereby you can migrate your real world database into a cloud storage system. Not only does this mean that you data is safer as firewalls and encryption protection is active all the time, but now your data analysts can fetch any file they need at anytime and anywhere. It allows them to compile detailed reports and not have to worry about accessing a hard drive in order to complete their task.
Where they belong
Researchers are not just purely consumed with studying your business internally or finding new ways to improve business functions. They are actually right at the heart of active development of products and services. It’s obvious that the best researchers belong in your research and development department. Researchers of all kinds, will be working with you most highly prized scientists, designers and engineers to develop every evolutionary stage of your goods and services. Scientists in your business will usually be tasked with research projects that determine what sort of materials would be best for your products. They’ll be working in labs and testing units where they can undertake temperature, stress and durability experiments. Engineers will do much the same thing with regards to the aim of their research. They will be working with designers to build products, stress test them and find new, better ways of making your existing products superior to their previous iteration.
Tracking current trends
Risk departments are full of professionals that are continuously calculating the current consumer markets. However a lot of their work is dictated by previous trends also. They are in-part researchers. In order for risk analysts to make sound decisions and advise the CEOs on the best course of actions through rough seas, is to know the history of the economy. That’s why they will often study the Great Recession, the Great Depression and various other consumer confidence events throughout history. From this, they can determine what kind of future may lay ahead for your business. They may be experts in tracking current trends but they are also learned in economic history which is why they often include valuable research of past events in their current day reports.
Researchers are monumentally important to the success of every business in the world. Very often, they play their roles behind the scenes and don’t often get limelight in the media or are known to the younger generation of professionals. But auditors are one of the key reasons why businesses are able to keep a clean house and deal with internal corruption so quickly in the modern day.
