By Jamillah Warner
You’re building a business and looking to solve problems for people. You’re paying the bills and paying your team for the work that they do. Still, it feels like your staffing situation is one big revolving door; it’s costing you time and money. But you can fix it with a shift in how you select and handle your team. In our 5-part series, we’ll be looking at a variety of business solutions to consider when building and working with your team.
1. Stop forcing a fit.
The whole “You’re my employee, so you’d better do the job I tell you to do” doesn’t motivate like it used to. Yes, you are the boss and they ought to do the work that you require, or the job may disappear. But business is much better with an inspired team.
They can be inspired by fear, but you can take it one step deeper by hiring people who are passionate about what they do. Get people into the areas that excite them and they’ll overdeliver; be patient when things change and savvy enough to grow with your company. Stop forcing a fit and start hiring the team that fits your environment.
2.Help your team learn and grow.
Cubiks, an assessment and consultancy firm, conducted a survey of 500 people in 33 countries to get a better understanding of employee attitudes toward on-the-job training. In reference to this study, The Global Recruiter reports that “93 percent of employees said they would stay longer with an organization that invests in their development.”
In other words, your team wants to be trained, not bored. They want to learn things that will make them better at what they do. So before you throw more money at them, take the time to discover their real values. Your team just may desire more training first. But what kind?
3. Stop training in a vacuum.
Remember, your employees have a life outside of your business — a life that, in a lot of ways, is more important to them than the paycheck you write. In a hiring environment in which, as the New York Times reports, younger employees don’t stay on jobs as long as Baby Boomers did, motivation comes in many forms.
In an article for the “Direct Farm Marketing and Tourism Handbook,” Bernard L. Erven says that training should help your employees “feel like they are improving and creating better opportunities for themselves” and shouldn’t be limited to just “teaching employees how to do things.” This means you can offer success, mindset and communication training — to name a few examples — in addition to instructions on how to use your company software, answer your phone and greet your customers.
Whether you’re hiring or training, the goal in every step of the process is to build a team that “gets it.” But sometimes the talented can be a little challenging to handle. Part 2 of this 5-part series will address what to do when your team is driving you nuts.
This post Team Building: Is Your Team Building Strategy Broken? was first published on the Big Ideas Blog.