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This story originally appeared on Under30CEO.com
You want to grow your business, of course, but are you a leader who motivates your team to perform better?
You can invest in new technology or hire the best and brightest…and you should! However, if you neglect your team members, you risk failing to grow your business.
Your success begins with the people you hire to help you grow your business. However, if you don’t understand their needs or fail to create an environment where they thrive, your business is bound to fail.
That being the case, how can you ensure your employees help you grow your business? Listed below are four strategies business owners can use to manage teams and cultivate growth effectively. Also, check out this article on Entrepreneur to review some of the top team management tools to use.
1. Foster psychological safety.
It’s important to make sure your employees feel comfortable asking questions, speaking up, and disagreeing with the order of things. They should be confident that no one will punish them for presenting their questions, voicing concerns, or making mistakes.
But why does psychological safety help grow your business? Psychological safety creates an environment where employees become comfortable with who they are. This results in them having more confidence at work. Confident employees perform better.
Promoting confidence can help you grow your business when employees feel safe taking risks, collaborating, and innovating. They feel comfortable enough to point out initiatives not helping the company and confidently seek market opportunities that propel your growth.
But how can you, as a manager, foster psychological safety?
- Allow employees to tell you when processes aren’t working.
- Recognize mistakes and failure as growth opportunities.
- Be willing to consider out-of-the-box or creative ideas, even when not tested or well-formulated.
2. Build a strong communication framework.
An effective communication framework consists of techniques that encourage teamwork and open communication. To grow your business, you need an effective communication strategy that helps get things done more efficiently.
What’s more, your communication strategy should improve employee engagement, create space for innovation, and increase productivity. But how can you ensure your communication design leads to business growth?
Use technology.
The right technology can help you create an environment where your employees share ideas, stay on top of projects, and proactively follow up with teammates. It doesn’t matter whether your team works in the office, remotely, or both; you need great communication tools if you want to grow your business.
Opt for a platform that allows teammates to share tasks, collaborate on projects, and interact socially. For example, Slack is an effective tool for all of this, but you can also leverage other collaboration tools such as Trello, Dropbox, Google Drive, and others.
Provide multiple feedback opportunities.
To truly have an open communication culture, you need to show employees that you want feedback and are willing to listen to it. Make sure they know you openly accept feedback. Ask for it during meetings. Use an app with which employees can offer feedback anonymously.
More importantly, do something with the feedback you’ve collected. You may not be able to implement every suggestion, but you can offer updates on why you implemented some suggestions and what was learned from the feedback.
Specify tasks and instructions.
Be clear on tasks and how they fit into company goals.
Give specific instructions, especially in terms of how employees should perform the task and deadlines for completion. That way, you avoid problems including project delays, partially completed work, costly mistakes, etc.
Boost departmental communication.
Practice good communication across departments if you want to grow your business. After all, every department works toward a common goal. The easiest way to achieve it is to have people work together, but how can you encourage communication across departments?
- Hold meetings where all departments are represented.
- Assign new employees mentors from other departments.
- Have regular meetings where different departments appraise others on projects they are working on.
- For remote teams, have channels or chat groups where teams from different departments can connect socially, ask questions, or share concerns.
3. Train and upskill.
Upskilling employees leads to improved performance, goal achievement, and better employee retention.
Source: TalentLMS
Upskilling can help you grow your business since it makes employees ready to adapt quickly to technological advances and changing market needs.
But how can you upskill your team? Have team members learn from others in-house, hire external experts, or invest in courses from online providers such as Coursera, Udemy, etc.
Create a work environment that supports and encourages self-development and appreciate the extra effort employees take to improve their skills. For example, you might offer to pay for a portion of their fees when they enroll in certain programs.
Most importantly, ensure they understand that their educational development contributes to the company’s success.
4. Design workplace experiences that grow your business.
What does it feel like for employees working in your business? Many businesses focus on offering great customer experiences but forget about providing an ideal environment for employees to offer these services.
To successfully grow your business, you’ll want to create an environment that enables employees to become productive. Every business outcome — from talent retention, productivity, efficiency, innovation, and growth — starts with how you make your employees feel.
Here are some simple suggestions you can use to offer your employees a great workplace experience.
- Provide employees with easy access to the resources and information they need to complete tasks.
- Modernize the physical workspace to ensure your employees feel safe and comfortable.
- Be aware of every employee’s professional journey and offer an adaptable and collaborative environment.
- Ensure employees clearly understand your business, purpose, mission, core values, and culture.
- Support a healthy life-work balance.
- Educate department heads and supervisors about the importance of healthy manager-employee relationships.
- Foster a collaborative and transparent culture.
- Improve the onboarding processes.
- Show recognition and give feedback.
Reinforce your team and they’ll help grow your business.
To grow your business, you need to do more than make sure your team understands their weekly tasks, your budget, and company goals. Growth requires determination, dedication, and team management strategies that boost productivity and innovation.