7 Tips to Transform your Business Through Your People

Investing in your employees is the smartest business decision you can make. As a leader, how your team performs and succeeds as professionals and how your company ranks financially are reflections of every strategic decision you make. Understanding this is essential when assessing areas for improvement and growth. Choosing to invest and foster growth in your employees will lead to highly skilled employees with higher satisfaction and productivity, which in turn improves your bottom line. In this article we will break down the ways that you can invest in your employees, ultimately leading to growth in your business.

1. Enable, Empower, and Encourage

One of the greatest values of an empowering manager is the ability to create an environment where people are empowered, contributing, productive, and happy. It means giving your employees permission to take action and make decisions within your business. It also means there is an understanding and trust that these decisions are aligned with the organizational goals. The key here is aligning people to your shared vision, helping them feel a part of something bigger than themselves and their individual job. It’s crucial to have people proud, excited and appreciative of your culture. Enable them, empower them, and encourage them. When they’re empowered by the vision, your business will thrive.

2. Motivate through Positivity

When employees see that you identify and value their commitment to their work, they will be motivated to give it their all every day. We all have bad days, but when people find a supportive company culture, it’s rare they move on. Never underestimate the power of small rewards. Money is not a long-term motivator, finding ways to engage with your people will result in more hard-working and loyal employees. Things like team events, lunches, and verbal recognition go a long way. If employees feel under-compensated for their role or responsibilities they take on, they won’t be empowered to work hard. While positive reinforcement is a huge motivator, it’s important to also have an appropriate compensation structure in place. This means paying competitively both internally and externally, to attract and retain top talent.

3. Demonstrate Your Trust

The best way to gain employee loyalty is demonstrating that they have your trust. When employees receive clear guidelines from their superior, they relax. Clarify the ends instead of the means and allow them to approach a task with their own ideas. This enables them to direct their efforts towards achieving results, not on worrying or second-guessing. Regardless of how an employee is performing on any given task, the value you have for them as a human being should always be evident. Through your actions and words, the goal is to demonstrate your appreciation for each person’s unique value to your team.

4. Be the Example

If your leaders aren’t aligned with your vision or aren’t motivated to create a healthy work environment, don’t expect your employees to be either. Too often, leaders know what it takes for their team to succeed but don’t hold themselves to the same or higher standards. It’s important to recognize that as a leader you were there once before, and appreciate the hard-work and dedication that your people put in. Try 360° feedback, when giving your employees feedback allow them the opportunity to do the same. Beyond that, be big enough to accept the constructive criticism. For leaders who are the example and don’t just talk values, they can expect the trickle down to be what they want – a positive work environment.

5. Hire Value, Create Value

Hire people smarter than you. Hiring intelligent people is one of the most direct ways to build your business’s success. A hiring manager may compare a candidate’s qualifications to the job description without sitting back and considering what they can learn from them. In some cases, managers don’t want to be outshined by the skills and experience of a new employee. It should be your goal to be in awe of every person you hire. Recognizing traits that are stronger than your own abilities in that area is an opportunity to grow. There are also many benefits to promoting within company ranks – benefits that can impact everything from employee morale to lower training costs. Promoting internally is also valuable to your organization in that it maintains its investment in employee skills and knowledge.

6. Keep an Open Mind

The most successful leaders welcome new ideas and diverse perspectives, allowing them to see upcoming opportunities and better solutions to problems. They can see past ego and ideologies to produce more effective plans. The hardest part tends to be overcoming the feeling of being in control, since having an open mind means being honest with yourself that you don’t know everything. When you’re open-minded to learning from everyone, you get the most out of having a team. It’s about taking advantage of multiple talented brains focused on meeting the same goals.

7. Build a Culture Around Humanity

Arguably one of the most important parts of building a successful business is meeting basic human needs and treating your people with value. Their basic needs must be met before they can give you their discretionary energy – the extra effort people voluntarily exert in their work. A simple way to start implementing a people-centric culture is by having an open-door policy to encourage openness and transparency in communication. Treating people with value ties into the importance of a positive workplace environment. A positive workplace culture improves teamwork, increases productivity and efficiency, raises the morale, enhances retention of the workforce, inspires creativity, and reduces stress. By fostering a positive culture, your employees will become more invested in what your business creates. The more invested they are, they more productive they will be.

Perritt & Associates HR Consulting specializes in all avenues of Human Resources, creating the right HR Strategy for your organization. Our continuous goal is simple – to transform businesses through their people.

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