You know your business has more potential but you feel as if you are stagnating?
You took on employees but had no management experience and now you’re struggling with the relationship conflicts and people not pulling their weight.
You envisaged an atmosphere of calm and kindness but instead, it’s fraught.
What can you do to try and resolve some of these issues?
Here are Four tips I’ve used with clients that do work:
1. Do you have a vision for the business? How do your employees know what the long-term view is for the business unless you share the vision? Normally they are a couple of sentences to a paragraph. Make sure it conveys passion and is descriptive. Then share with employees both as a narrative and also as a face to face – sharing the story of how you got to this and what it means from your angle.
2. Has your business put in place behaviours and values, so the employees and customers know what to expect and what your business represents? If you are having issues with employees, then when having that difficult conversation, it’s great to be able to refer back to the behaviours and value statements. It helps make the conversations easier. Involving employees in identifying the behaviours and values the business needs and wants can really create buy-in and at the same time reinforces what is expected. It also helps create the right environment for people to thrive and for peace to be generated.
3. Think about the long-term future and therefore map out your processes to fully understand them. Maybe you’ve been going a while and processes have always been done the same way and no one has looked at what the end to end process is. Take some time out to map the journey and then get the team to discuss it. Don’t just accept what has always happened. Ask why and explore timings and quality outcomes. Often you will spot something in the process that isn’t needed and this will then create saving and speed up the journey or you will see a different process route that speeds you up. And by involving employees they feel they have an input and as at the heart of the work, will see it differently.
4. Once you have your process map, it will help you identify key stages, where you can draw up training guides and standard work instructions. Often small employers feel as if they don’t have the time to do this but in the long term it is better to train someone with a consistent approach. And remember to combine the doing with a written instruction as well as photos or screenshots. It ensures you are catering to the different learning styles.
It’s amazing how involving the team and taking these steps will generate a better feel for the business and gives the building blocks you need.
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