6 lessons that business owners can learn from bees
Beehives, and bees themselves, are perfectly designed. They are functional, economical, productive and highly organised. Maybe it’s time you learned a little from nature.
1. Leadership And Social Structure
A beehive has a strict social structure, and for very good reason. You have the queen, who is the reason they live, the one who controls the hive. You have the worker bees, the ones going out each day, finding pollen, pollinating plants, doing the mahi, making the honey. Then you have drones, the male bees, whose only purpose in life is to mate with the queen and ensure repopulation of the hive. It’s a finely tuned machine, and the queen needs her drones and workers for her survival- she could not survive on her own.
So is a business. You have the CEO or manager, who oversees the wellbeing of all the staff. You have teams of people assigned to specific tasks, that work together to produce the service or product. Together, as a team, we can achieve. Without the other workers doing their job, a business will fail..
2. Pollinating is a daily task
While a bee flies around collecting nectar and pollen, they are also inadvertently ensure one third of the world’s food supply. As they bury themselves in flowers, they get covered in pollen. Then, they fly to another flower and spread the pollen from the previous flower in that one, pollinating it. And the cycle continues, throughout a bee’s busy day.
In the same way, a business owner should be pollinating as a side effect from running their business. As they move through their day, they come into contact with other business owners. This is networking, and collaboration. A good business owner should always be networking and pollinating their business—as well as pollinating businesses alongside it.
3. Small, agile and intelligent
A bee’s brain is tiny, about the size of a sesame seed. Yet it continually makes complex calculations about foraging and distances required. They dance to show other bees how to access the best food sources. They have a complex social structure, yet each bee knows exactly what their job is.
In New Zealand, we are a tiny part of the world. Compared to the India, China, the US, or even our cousin Australia, we are little. But we are highly intelligent, capable of doing more than our fair share of heavy lifting, in a business sense. Our number eight wire mentality and highly innovative thinking make us quick responders to complex solutions. We may be small, but we are agile and intelligent, making us world leaders in a huge variety of industries.
4. A hive is the perfect framework for strength and function
Bees don’t waste an iota of space, and nothing they do is due to chance. Their hive structure is the perfect example of that. Hexagonal wax shapes are compact, strong, and means zero wastage. They need less wax in order to build them, and together they create a strong, seamless, infinitely functional home with zero waste of resources.
This is where you and your business should be. Building a hive of efficient, complex and seamless business structures that work together as a base for your team of workers. Evaluate your business processes and look to eliminate waste – Take our business process health survey to see where you can improve. Once you’veidentified areas to improve, implement automation technology like Ui Path and EdCast to optimise your business and strengthen its form and function. Look to automate mundane tasks by using robotic process automation and utilise digital adoption to deliver information just in time.
Whether they are working from home, setting up a remote office on the other side of the world, or there’s a need to give access to information or your platform, software like this can make it happen. These robust programmes help enhance user productivity, maximising each business opportunity and adding resilience to your business.
These programmes inspire collaboration, with real time access to everything a business needs, for everyone who needs it. They offer automation, turning processes that took valuable time and were prone to human error, into tasks completed in milliseconds, with 100% accuracy. They offer deep insights into your business, allowing you to see where bottlenecks occur and where changes need to be made for the best workflow and productivity. And it’s all easy to implement and use. Broca Consulting’s clients typically pay off any investment they make between six to 18 months.
5. 5 milliseconds makes a difference.
5 milliseconds. That’s how long a bee’s wing beats for. That’s about 200 beats per second. Imagine if a bee flew slowly, how much less honey they’d make or how many less flowers they’d pollinate.
Automation technology takes time consuming, often error-prone processes, and makes them instantaneous. There’s no painful data entry, or time-consuming communications. Instead, automation makes things happen in less than 5 milliseconds, increasing capabilities, efficiencies and reducing errors at the same time.
6. Make your service or product as unique as honey
Honey, the output that bees create that humans consume, is incredible. It is the only food that includes all the substances necessary to sustain life, including enzymes, vitamins, minerals, and water; and it’s the only food that contains pinocembrin, an antioxidant associated with improved brain functioning. The more scientists study honey, the more they realise the incredible varied ways it can help human’s health, skin, and well-being.
Your product or service should be just as unique, helpful and amazing to your customers. What you create should be the absolute perfect solution for your customers. On time, perfectly suited to their needs, and a part of their business they cannot do without.
The hive can teach us a lot about efficient, well-designed business
Bees and their hive structures are the ultimate in intelligent design. Not one element of their lives has been left to chance, and your business should be the same. If you know your business isn’t quite hive-efficient, contact us at Broca Consultancy Services. Together, we can find the problems and inefficiencies in your business. We can streamline, creating a business structure as strong, reliable, and efficient as honeycomb. We can help ensure your staffing structure is clearly defined, so the Queen isn’t having to do all the work herself. And finally, we can ensure your customers will love your product because it’s absolute perfection.
