If you’re driven to success, to making a great company as much as making money, then you need to look at the people with you. You want to make a team, not just a staff. So how do you do that? The secret lies in motivation and workplace happiness. If you don’t put care into maintaining your staff, they’re not going to put care into the work they provide for you. So here’s how you do that.
Morale
Morale isn’t something transient and unexplainable. It’s the very real measurement of dissatisfaction versus inspiration. Morale is increased through developing cohesiveness between employees. Through making that ‘team’ feeling. Team outings are a way of doing just that. As is organising team pub visits. But most important is what you do in the office. How you reward work and react to failure. Treat them like humans, not work animals.
Organisation
A lot of office dissatisfaction will also build due to problems in the workplace that get in the way of their productivity. People don’t like being held up or disturbed, so keeping the office well organised benefits both you and them. This could be as simple as arranging an office clearance to get rid of clutter. Or updating your filing system. Take the little roadblocks everyone in the office faces and get them out of the way.
Efficiency
After you’ve made things less disorganised, go the extra mile and making their tasks easier and more efficient. There are a lot of processes in the average office, from product/service delivery to customer management and HR. Sit with your staff and figure out ways to systematise them. Make a handbook to their job and boil things down to the most efficient ways of doing those tasks.
Opportunity
Helping them make a better go at their day-to-day is important. But you also need to be focused on the future as well. Everyone who’s serious about their career seeks upward mobility. Help them find the opportunities for that. It might mean delegating tasks to help them build experience. Developing career plans with them. Creating positions for people to rise to. Even finding training opportunities for them. Invest in them, so they know you care about their careers, not just your company.
Drive
High morale goes a long way towards creating an effective, motivated workforce. But to be motivated, they also need to understand what their motivation is. If your staff loses sight of what they’re doing, you need to be there to help set goals for them. Give them something to work towards and something to feel good about when they meet those goals.
Excellence
Make them feel excellent not just about what goals they reach, but also how they reach them, too. Work with your staff to identify key performance indicators. Help them find ways to better reach them. Make sure they understand that this is more about helping them raise their standards, not just criticising them. Everyone wants to believe they have value where they work. KPIs can help them understand better the value they do have.
