If you are keen to expand your business, the chances are that you will need to hire a bank of employees that will help you grow and become more successful. Growth means greater demand, and a greater need for ultimate productivity. While you may have gone it alone before in your little home office, you now need to commit to delegating to other people. This can be hard when your startup has been your baby for a few years. However, to expand and to grow, you need to welcome others into your solitary inner circle.
When you do hire people to work with you, you must make clear what your goals are at interview. There’s no point hiring a team of individuals. You need a cohesive team that buys into your business vision and will perform to the best of their abilities for the benefit of your venture. Hiring staff can be a difficult period in your company’s existence. You will need to find your feet, allow your new staff to bed in, and work out how to communicate with them. Crucially, you need to ensure that your team are happy and content. This may sound a little wishy washy, but by respecting your team and by facilitating an environment for them to thrive, you can maximise their success. Take a look at how taking care of your employees will empower them to take care of you.
Communication
As an employer, you need to be present in your role. Don’t become one of those bosses who hole themselves in their office for weeks on end, never to be seen. You will become a mythical creature, and your staff will feel alone in their roles. Instead, be the boss that you’d love to have.
Communicate with your team at all times and get to know their names. If you have a small team working in the office, have a team meeting every Monday morning. This sets the tone for the week and gives your staff ample opportunity to air their opinions and views. If you are starting a new initiative, ask for their opinions and see if they have any ideas that might improve on yours. There’s no shame in asking for help or ideas from the bright minds in your office. After all, you hired them!
Send out an email every Friday detailing the company’s successes. Celebrate when targets are met or exceeded and ensure that you namecheck those individuals who have performed exceptionally well that week. By giving them the praise and recognition they deserve you are showing them the utmost respect. This will help your staff to feel appreciated and will boost morale. With happy people working for you, they will put more effort into their jobs and be more productive.
Tools
You must utilise your workforce by playing to their strengths. There’s nothing worse as an employee than being given a job title only to be performing duties totally unrelated to the task. This can lead to low morale and a high turnover of staff. By utilising tools that allow you to create a skills capability map, you’ll be able to identify those staff members who can perform specific tasks to a high standard. This means that you can identify the supply and demand of the talent you have and will help you to identify any skills gaps you may have. This will empower you to outsource specific business functions if the skills aren’t in house or you can hire a new employee.
Environment
As a boss, it’s vital that you create a dynamic environment in which to work. The beige carpet tiles, mouldy window seals and leaky ceiling simply won’t do. You need to modernize your environment and allow your team to enjoy coming into work every morning. Without an inspiring environment, the chances are you will find absenteeism increasing and morale dipping. This can result in lower productivity and a lower quality of work.
Make your environment bright and airy. Whip out the white paint, sort the mould issues and install spotlights instead of harsh strip lighting. Add a touch of greenery to bring the outdoors in and swap the desktop booths for collaborative meeting pods. By keeping the office more open plan you can foster those water cooler moments. You want your workplace to be inspiring enough and comfortable enough to make people share their ideas, and work together to create the most dynamic work plans.
Give your team the best equipment to work with. Go as far as your budget will stretch and purchase decent laptops, upgrade your servers and enjoy the comfort of ergonomically designed chairs. By allowing your team to work with excellent hardware, you are ensuring that there is minimal downtime, and that you won’t have a queue of complaining staff at your office door.
Away Days
Taking your employees away for a team building weekend can be seen as a little cringeworthy. However, you should give the renewed team building away days a chance. Yes, you could go old school and try to build a bridge over an imaginary river of crocodiles together, or you could simply get away from the office for some strategic planning. With an agenda in hand, you could empower your staff to offer their ideas for where the company should be going. Relinquishing a little control to your staff shows them that you are not merely paying lip service to their ideas. You are asking for their help. Your humble nature will make them more inquisitive about your business vision. If they can help to shape it, they will buy into it. Then, they will work hard to see the vision realised.
Being a boss is difficult, especially if you are used to being a full time employee. However, by being a decent human being, looking after your staff’s welfare and communicating effectively, you can help your workforce to feel happy and content in their roles. This will make your team productive and willing to fulfil their potential for the good of your business. Remember, if you take care of your employees, they will take care of you.
