People are the lifeblood of any business organization. It’s safe to say that a company would not reach its full potential without its people.
Naturally, one of the major goals of the leadership team is to motivate their best people to stay. And there are a lot of factors that make professionals want to stay with their employer for the long term.
We’ve compiled them in this handy guide, and each week we’ll be outlining the best steps you can take to sustain each factor.
FACTOR 1 – FAMILIARITY
Step 1: Know who your people are.
Knowing your employees’ names and faces goes a longer way than you might think. It establishes that you acknowledge their presence. It tells them that you know they exist in the organization. Compare that with a leader who is perceived as cold and uncaring because they don’t even know the people around them. No one wants to work under a person who could care less about them being there!
So pay attention during introductions. Make an effort to remember at least the employee’s first name and their face; it’s so much more encouraging for them to hear their name when you call them.
Likewise, urge your people to know each other and the leadership team by name. This gesture works both ways, after all.
(BONUS! If you – as well as everyone in the management – are thoroughly familiar with everyone in your organization, you can enjoy a smaller risk of being deceived by an outsider pretending to be one of your employees.)
Step 2: Be familiar with their roles.
This step should make perfect sense; you need to have a clear idea of what each of your employees does for the company.
When you need to delegate, having this familiarity with what your people do will enable you to assign the best personnel for whatever task needs to be done. It will also help everyone immediately identify who the “go-to” persons are for specific concerns.
Apart from that, having this knowledge of everyone’s roles is not only helpful when delegating tasks or pointing people in the right direction. It also helps affirm your people that what they do is acknowledged and respected. The feel that what they do is something that tangibly advances the organization’s goals. It makes them feel that their job is essential, no matter how small.
Step 3: Understand their situations.
Your recruitment team should have already built a preliminary profile and thorough background investigation report for each employee prior to them getting hired. Use that as a base to understand key points about the individual backgrounds of your people.
Have a solid idea of what their personal circumstances are in terms of living conditions, especially the challenges they have to face in order to survive and thrive. Using this information, you can make sound judgements in scenarios that involve them such as with attendance concerns or disciplinary action. Whatever the occasion may be, you can treat them on a more case-to-case basis when you’re aware of things that make their situation unique.
It follows, of course, that you don’t need to have their backgrounds memorized. Just have a well-maintained personnel file for each of them that you can review when the need arises. And if you’re friends with them outside the workplace, even better! That would make it easy to become familiar with some aspects of their family setup and daily life.
Step 4: Keep up with news that affects them.
It’s not just your employees’ backgrounds that you need to be aware of: current events can also affect them individually or as a group.
Industry developments, new labor legislations, safety and health standard updates, and market trends are some of the obvious factors to consider. But do also keep in mind any holiday declarations, changes in transportation and traffic conditions, weather reports, coverage of natural or man-made incidents, and other things that may affect your people’s day-to-day lives.
In fact, this goes hand-in-hand with having a solid awareness of your employees’ backgrounds: you would be able to develop a clear idea of what kinds of news are relevant to them.
Next week, we’ll have a rundown of things that you can do to make your people feel valued through communication. Until then: don’t be stingy with the appreciation. Valued employees are productive employees!