Three Steps to Happier Employees

The success of any growing company is dependent on the success of its individual employees. It’s easy to get so caught up in the day-to-day details of management and client interactions, that you may find yourself assuming your employees are just as motivated and engaged as you are. That’s a dangerous assumption! Follow these three tips to make sure your employees stick with you through the good days or bad.

1. Give them a voice in their own future

In business, change is a given, and a natural fuel for growth. It can, however, create unintended stress and surprises for your team. Make sure that when big changes come down the pike, you’re communicating and listening to your employees about their ideas for how to handle the changes, as well as voicing problems or concerns with how the change is being managed.

2. Assess workload and automate or outsource unnecessary tasks

All jobs get stressful, but not all employees have to be stressed. Your employees should be playing to their strengths, and if they’re getting bogged down in activities that don’t inherently add value to the company or its clients, you’re ultimately losing money. Consider outsourcing lead capture and order form entry to an outside service. If call volume to your office is frequently overwhelming, seek out a no-contract, bilingual call answering service to take in overflow calls and assist with routine customer service questions so your sales team can be focused on calling on leads.

3. Give them your trust

You hired your employees because you saw in them the means to growth and success to your company. Those individuals may not always do things the way you do, but that may lead to solutions and innovation that you would never have gotten to without them! Even if an employee wants to start a new project, or changes a process you wouldn’t have, check the results before you try micromanaging or preaching the established way. Empowering employees to own their work gives them confidence and alleviates at least some of the barriers that can easily build up between management and worker bees.