From start-ups to the Amazons in business, these problems and their solutions could help you growing and maintaining your company’s objectives in 2024
1. HOW TO MOTIVATE UNMOTIVATED STAFF
We are all motivated by different things, have different dreams, beliefs and reasons for taken the job. It will be detrimental to you and your business if you think that your staffs only motivation is money. It’s not true and you know it.
Understanding what your employees really want or their reason for coming to work every day will set you up for greatness in 2024.
Once you know what drives them, you can use that to increase their motivation to do more for your company.
One meeting a year won’t cut it! Just because you pay them doesn’t mean they trust you enough to open up to you.
Set time aside on a regular basis to develop the trust, Listen to them, talk last and try to ask revealing questions like “how do you think the company can do better in 2019?” These types of questions will give you answers. Asking an employee “what do you think is wrong with the company” will make your staff member immediately shut down and feel unsure how to answer and you’ll get answers that help neither of you.
STAFF + WHAT THEY NEED = MOTIVATED STAFF
2. CUSTOMERS ARE NOT ALWAYS RIGHT?
I see this mistake all the time. The customer complains and immediately the company sides with the customer, whether the customer is right or wrong and this single-handedly leads to staff being demotivated.
Keep in mind that the actions will reach all the corners of your company and injustice leaves a bitter taste in the mouth.
The best thing to do is when you receive a complaint, figure out the validity of the complaint. Speak to all parties involved and get as much information on the situation. Ultimately you are going to have to make the decision in the end. Remember the key to success in this situation is EMPATHY.
3. YOUR COMPANY ISN’T AS GOOD AS THE COMPETITION.
This type of mentality should have no place in your mind or the mindset of your managers and staff.
You are the boss, figure out the areas of improvement, analyse the weak links in your company and hire better moving forward.
Your mindset will set the tone of the company and if you think it, your staff will think it and eventually your clients will think about it.
4. CULTURE IS CULTIVATED. THE GOOD AND THE BAD COMES FROM THE TOP
The top is a lonely place and the buck always ends with you so if you don’t like how your leadership is behaving or the message they are sending to the rest of the company, it’s your job to put an end to it.
You set the example. You do nothing about it the rest of the company will follow suit.
I hate when I have a meeting with owners and they tell me how poorly their staff dresses yet they are the mirror image of the same complaint.
Everything starts and ends with you!
5. TRUST = SPEED
So many managers and owners complain to me about how their staff takes so long to finish a task but when I investigate more into the situation I discovered that most times it’s the same answer. The employees feel the owner/manager does not trust them and so many times they are micromanaged and this ultimately slows the progress down completely.
It is your responsibility to build trust with your staff and that starts with you giving your trust freely. Your staff will either, take your trust and build on it, or, they will demonstrate that they can’t be trusted and must be replaced.
They lack of trust is the home of anxiety, if your team thinks that you don’t trust them they will second guess themselves and produce second rate work in fear of “dropping the ball” when they are actually capable of being your companies stop scorer. If they believe that you have trust in them and their abilities they will work harder to prove that belief and in the end both you and the company will succeed because of it.
What are you doing to grow your business in 2024?