Invest in your staff for business success – seven key areas

Business expert, Karen Blatchford, explains seven key ways to keep your staff motivated for the long term.

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Your people are your most important asset. Making the most of your employees’ skills, talents and loyalty means they can help you and your business achieve your ultimate goal.

The way you understand your people, communicate and develop them is fundamental in motivating them. As a result they can be inspired to be part of achieving key business goals – and be taken on the company journey.

Here are seven key areas for consideration when investing in your people:

Your strategy and plan

Your organizational plan should include the operational and employee performance standards required to achieve your strategic objective. When your vision is clear then employees will understand their role in delivering the business goals.

Don’t forget the importance of an organization chart. This creates a picture of your business and shows the roles required to meet the business needs – people are then employed to fill those positions, not the other way around.

Effective leadership

To be an effective leader, it’s important to apply a fresh way of thinking of your business.  Take a check on how you apply your time.  If you are spending too much time on operational or technical work, then you probably won’t have time to be leading and creating value within your business.

An effective leader creates an environment where people feel safe. Employees can learn, challenge themselves, take pride in owning their responsibilities and feel motivated to grow and contribute to the business objectives.

Culture and positive employee relations

For your business to be successful and profitable, the right culture is key. Recruit candidates whose values, beliefs, outlooks and behaviors fit in with your organizational culture. The job interview can help assess the cultural fit of a potential candidate.

A successful business needs its employees to work together harmoniously, putting their energy and attention into getting results for your business.

It’s important for a business to improve or maintain its employee engagement so it’s essential to measure it. Measuring the right things in the right way is critical to impact business outcomes or improving the bottom line.

Employee training and development

Create a work environment where your people can grow with you, as they help your business grow.  Look at any training needs, just like Power BI training, to improve performance – you can often use your own skilled people to cross-train others. Encourage a “can do” culture by recognizing employees who are getting things done effectively.

Creating the road map for your employees’ success

Job descriptions are written agreements between employees and their managers. They can help employees to achieve results by clearly capturing why their position exists in the company, the specifics of the work that’s required and how it should be performed. Setting annual objectives ad giving assessments from https://www.makipeople.com/tests/logical-reasoning will ensure employees are focusing on the right things to take the business forward.

Ethics, conduct and standards

Maintaining a high level of ethics, conduct and standards in your business will increase its authority in the marketplace, creating better relationships with clients and making it more sustainable.

Behaving ethically is absolutely critical to maintaining your business’s positive reputation.

Effective management

And finally, managing your business effectively is not the same as leading it, but the two are intertwined. By having your end-goal in mind, effective management is about organizing the business in such a way that it runs independently and efficiently, breeding success.

For more guidance on these seven key areas of investing in people, visit our Future Fit website at www.oldmutualinternational.com/invest-in-people

 

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