It is always helpful to get more out of your employees. In fact, you can see them as one of the most central resources in your business. The better you make use of them, the better a position your business will be in. Let’s look at some of the most powerful ways to get more out of your employees.
All staff need encouragement to work well. If you encourage them, you will find that your colleagues do their best work, and that they are inspired to work as hard as possible. However, if you are struggling to develop an encouraging working culture in your business, there are things you can do to improve this.
You should think about what it is that really encourages people to work harder. People differ, of course, but in general you will find that they are much more likely to be encouraged if you know what they respond well to. Kind words and paying close attention to their work are two effective methods. If they know that you are paying attention and that you appreciate their good work, they will be much more likely to carry on producing good work.
Most workers are also encouraged by a good rewards system. The best rewards are those which are directly beneficial to the individual. Offering higher pay, a bonus in the next paycheck, or some improved benefit can all be effective. You shouldn’t underestimate the power of encouragement in your business.
But encouragement alone won’t suffice. If you are to get more out of your staff, you will also need to think about scheduling your staff well. Proper scheduling is a matter of knowing what people you have, how much work they need to do, and what kind of timeframe you have to work with, so that you can fit all this together as well as possible. You will therefore first need to work all that out as finely as possible.
Once you are aware of all that, you will need to find a way to bring it all together. There are plenty of tools that will help you to do this more effectively, and one of the most useful is a specialized piece of software such as the Sling schedule maker. That is a powerful means of keeping everyone working to schedule, and it means that you are much less likely to overlook anything hugely important in doing so. It is also important to keep your employees fully aware of the schedule - something which ties in well with our next topic for discussion.
Good communication is one of those cliches which are actually deeply steeped in reality. As long as you have some decent communication going on in the culture of your workplace, your people will find their work much easier and will be more likely to enjoy it. But again, it can be tricky to make this a reality. However, it is perfectly possible with the right approach.
It helps to start with yourself. By being more communicative yourself, you can passively encourage others to follow in your footsteps, and that will lead to a much better culture in no time. You can also make a point of actively encouraging others to be more communicative in the workplace, and this will generate the kind of active and engaging working culture which is really going to help things along nicely. This can take some time to get right, but ultimately it is going to mean that you have a much more engaged and proactive workforce.
It’s important to remember that what goes on in the workplace is not a vacuum away from everything else that happens in the business. If you want your employees to be working as hard and as effectively as possible, you need to ensure that you are paying them well too, and offering them plenty in the way of benefits. That is going to make an enormous difference to how they approach their work. Research plays an important role here, as it enables you to see what you should be paying your staff.
That research is usually a matter of discovering what other businesses are offering their employees, in order to match it - or beat it. The clearer you are on where you lie in the competitive range, you will know how happy your employees are likely to be. They will be much more encouraged by a good paycheck, and you’ll keep hold of them for longer.
If you need to rearrange your budget a little to make this work, so be it. It’s a necessary change which will create a much more productive workforce.
What benefits you offer will also be something that makes a big difference to motivation in the workplace. Any workforce that is receiving a decent set of benefits will be much happier to work hard. You might choose to offer more in the way of healthcare, dental, or insurance. Or you might offer environmental benefits, such as providing staff with bikes to get to work. This all makes a difference in the long run.
You also need to make sure that you actually have the right kind of employees. If they are the kind of people who are actually going to enjoy working for your business, and be really passionate about it, you will find that you are going to have a much easier time getting a lot more out of them. This all begins in the recruitment process, so it’s important to know what qualities you need.
The important question here is: who are the right people? In a simple sense, the right employee is one who is passionate about the work, and who wants to work for you. It’s not just that simple, however. You also need to find individuals with specific qualities that are going to be beneficial to the team. Hard-working is a must. After all, you can only encourage a member of staff so much. After a certain point, they need to also be self-motivating. Look for that when you are hiring people if you want to keep your workforce strong and motivated. You also want your staff to be trustworthy. And if they have plenty of experience, then that is no bad thing either.
It’s important to ask your employees what they think you could improve in the working culture, and in the business more generally. You might be surprised to discover that they have some powerful ideas, and utilizing those ideas can be a great way to create a culture they will find useful and beneficial. That will absolutely lead to a workforce which is working much harder.
To get that right, it is necessary to make it clear that you are genuinely paying attention to them. This is likely to inform everything you do, as it should. The employee who feels their employer pays attention is going to be more likely to put their opinion forward. Your business will definitely benefit from this flow of ideas.
Whether it’s a feedback box in the manager’s office, or a one-to-one between you and staff, gathering this information is important.
As long as you pay attention to your staff, and to the other things detailed here, you should find that you are going to have a much more successful business in no time. You might even create a happier workforce too.
