Many factors determine whether a business is successful, and staff engagement is an important one. By engaging your work force, you ensure that everyone shares the same values and is moving in the same direction to achieve your organisation’s goals.
Having everyone working together and sharing the same values makes for a harmonious and more productive environment. This has a huge impact on how fast your business grows.
Colleague engagement really is something that start-ups need to think about and implement from the start. Doing so is a great way of building a positive culture into your business.
Not doing so has the opposite effect and leads to serious issues. Unengaged, poorly lead workforces simply end up going their own way. Effectively your workforce ends up creating the culture and values of your company instead of you.
Normally, this is not a good thing. When people are left to their own devices, they tend to take the path of least resistance. They tend to cut corners and ultimately not give a good service.
When that happens the good reputation that made your products and services stand out from the competition, and bought you your first wave of customers, evaporates. A lack of strong leadership and staff engagement really can literally destroy a business.
Fortunately, staff engagement is not something that needs to take up a huge amount of your time. Strategic engagement allows you to make sure that everyone is working together without it taking up too much of your time.
Below are the most important aspects of staff engagement that you need to ensure are covered:
Staff Induction
The first step is staff induction. Showing someone how to do their job is of course essential, but you also need to sit new members of your team down and share your firm’s vision, purpose and values.
Doing this instils from an early stage the firm’s values into new members of staff. It helps them to settle into faster and ensures that they are motivated to do a good job from the very beginning.
Reinforcing Vision, Purpose and Values
Simply sharing your firm’s values, purpose and vision at the induction stage is not enough. It is important to remind staff of them on a regular basis.
This can be done at various points. It is good practice to evaluate all employees on a regular basis, to ensure that every person knows how well they are doing their job. At these evaluations, managers should relate each member of staff’s performance back to the firm’s key values and goals.
A Strong Management Team
Key to running a successful business is having a strong management team. Investing in management training and giving them the chance to learn effective leadership skills is extremely important. On a day-to-day basis, they set the tone. If your management team are not engaged and strong leaders, your staff engagement will never be effective.
If you want your start up to grow as fast as possible, it is important to invest in your workforce at an early stage and provide strong leadership. Doing so, pays dividends both in the short and the long term.
