How to Turn your Team into a GREAT team and Keep them!

Employees who are actively engaged in their work are much more likely to stay in the role with your business and deliver high levels of productivity and profitability.

Unfortunately, most businesses have dis-engaged employees.

According to Gallop “85% of employees are not engaged or actively disengaged at work. The economic effect of this global “norm” is approximately $7 trillion in lost productivity. Eighteen percent are actively disengaged in their work and workplace, while 67% are “not engaged.” 

OK but what does this mean in plain English?

It means that the majority of people working in businesses (that 67%) are indifferent. They are turning up to work, ‘doing their time’ but not giving their best effort or their best ideas.

This is a global problem, which is essentially saying to us that most businesses don’t know how to really lead and manage their employees.

And let’s face it. If you are a BIG business (thousands of staff, million of profit $$$) you can probably get away with it.

But if you are one of the small ones, where profit counts and productivity is key – this problem will hit you hard. It will hurt your bottom line (which means your back pocket) and it will probably lead to sleepless nights, stress and possibly burnout for you, the leader.

All is not lost! There are so many ways to improve your leadership and management of your team and lots of litte things you can start right now to make sure everyone is ENGAGED!

Try these 7 steps and watch your business thrive with a happy, engaged and enthusiastic team!

1. Ensure your team know what is expected of them – Provide them with solid and clear goals (describe success to them) and hold regular performance discussions and goal-setting meetings. If you are thinking that ‘performance meetings’ are horrible scary meetings that happen once a year, stop it. They should be enjoyable, energising and easy for both sides.

2. Make sure your team has the systems & environment resources they need to do the job right. (Always maxing out on memory and having to delete files? Get them a new hard drive. Using free software and busy with workarounds? Pay for the upgrade. Struggling to get their system to work? Buy them a laptop. Struggling to upload files? Upgrade their internet)

3. Spend time understanding your team members individual Job Preferences and make a development plan for them to either a) use their strengths every day or b) be able to use them in in the near future.

4. Recognise, Reward & Celebrate. Public recognition, personal praise, stop and smell the roses. Too often we spend more time talking about the ‘improvements required’ and don’t dwell long enough on the good stuff. Write a personal email (better still write a letter!) to say thank you to a team member for a great job. Acknowledge stand out performance on a team call or meeting. Have team bonding catchups and celebrate the success of a launch or similar high pressure business event.

5. Structure extra time into a team gathering/meeting for team members to voice their opinions, give constructive feedback and talk about what they want to see improved. Resist the urge to cut this meeting short and let them discuss, solve and conclude and get it out.

6. Communicate your  business mission and purpose and make sure every team member knows how their role fits into achieving this. Everyone is important in getting you from here to there.

7. Ensure your work environment has time and space for fun, a bit of socialising, banter as well as hard work, results and profit.  Everything is about balance.

Interested in learning more? Think these ideas are good but unsure how to implement them into your unique business environment? Or need to tweak what you are currently doing? Book in for a free discovery call with me and let’s see what we can do together.

Credit to Gallup for their ongoing great research they provide us about workplaces! If you’d like to read more in their articles you can click here:

Gallup Article or here for Gallups Workplace report 2017