In any size company, those leading the team are playing a dual game: build the best customer experience you possibly can in order to be highly profitable AND create a culture that employees deeply love their jobs. Great leaders know that those two tasks are actually intertwined, but it can be easy to place a greater focus on your customers than your employees.
Teams that are able to retain and highly engage their employees are able to deliver incredible customer experiences and higher quality products and services – the company becomes a well-oiled machine.
One of the best ways to do this is to approach your human resources holistically. Thinking about your processes and your people all at once. Is the process effective AND is it enjoyable for the employee? What stresses the team out and how can we make changes that are in our employees best interest, even if it means we produce slightly fewer widgets per hour?
Your employees are human beings in your care as a company leader. In your role, y0u desire to feel effective, a sense of purpose, a sense of community, safe, and appreciated. If you’re leading in your company, you have the power to create an environment in which you would also thrive as an employee.
Effectivity
When you’re doing a job, you want to know you’re doing it well. In addition to employee reviews, what other ways can you help someone to know they’re doing the job correctly and thoroughly? Can you deploy opportunities for self-reflection, process checklists, or debriefs to simply give your employees opportunities to answer the question: “Am I doing the job well?”
Purpose
Some jobs feel menial compared to the bigger mission of the company, but it takes an entire team to do the work. How are you communicating the impact of your work on the end user to the front lines of your team? Are you telling the story of your mission in action well? Are you sharing customer testimonials and the deeper impact of your work with your team on a regular, repeated basis? Cranking out widgets feels meaningless, but creating a safe vehicle in which families bond, create memories, and propel their life forward feels purposeful.
Community
We spend the majority of our lives at work, so it is critical that people have space to form relationship and feel a part of a tribe at work. Carving out space for social and relational opportunities injects a quality of life into your business and gives your people a better life.
Safety
Your team should feel safe both physically and emotionally. Physical safety is often our focus, but finding ways to define safety not only as a place where one “avoids injury” but as a place where one is able to be themselves without fear. The only way to do this is to be intentional about embracing the individuals on your team and allowing them to fail, and learn from their mistakes.
Appreciation
Your employees earn their paycheck. They give their time and skill in exchange for money. That’s all you owe them. So, what happens when you go beyond that to tell them how valuable they are, regularly? What happens when that relationship moves beyond its transactional nature into a relational one? We encourage you to find out.
We would love to advise your HR team on ways they can better create an employee-centric culture. Book some time with us (free of charge!) and throw your toughest questions at us.