Video: Tips for Rallying Employees Around Business Operations

Most successful companies are built on solid business operations. While working with employees to embrace and engage in these practices is critical, it can also be challenging. These are your Tips For Rallying Employees Around Your Business Operations.

Whether your business is for-profit or non-profit, the key to achieving your operational goals is to develop a firm foundation of sound operational practices. There can be challenges in getting your employees to embrace these practices and execute them flawlessly. Let’s take a look at some techniques that can help overcome these challenges.

First, you want to set the right expectations. Employee performance is stronger when they know what’s expected of them. As a leader, it’s your job to establish these clear expectations for every job and team in your company. It’s also equally important that you hold employees and teams accountable for meeting these expectations. One strategy is to meet regularly with your managers to review individual and team performance. Managers can then provide feedback to their direct reports about how well they’re meeting expectations, as well as suggesting ways to improve results.

Next, you’ll want to keep the lines of communication open. Good communication should flow in BOTH directions. And poor communication is one of the biggest obstacles to employee buy-in and operational engagement. A great strategy to improve communication is to create a feedback loop. This helps employees feel comfortable when talking to their managers about any concerns they may have, or sharing ideas about ways to improve operations.

Maintaining clarity and transparency in your company is also important. The key strategy here is clearly spelling out all corporate policies, processes, and procedures to avoid any confusion or ambiguity. Management should also be transparent when it comes to the REASONS why certain policies, processes, and procedures are in place. It’s not enough to say “just because” or “we’ve always done it that way” when responding to a question about operations. Maintaining transparency can improve the employees’ buy-in and can increase  loyalty to both you and your business.

Additionally, sharing your vision for the company’s future… including growth areas and the potential impact on operations… can help encourage employees to remain with the company for the long haul… and create more engagement. Another important technique is to share your vision for the future. Most employees today want to know where the company is headed and what kinds of opportunities this might include for them. The best strategy to accomplish this is to be open about future business plans, including growth areas and the potential impact on operations. This can help encourage employees to remain with your company for the long haul and creates more engagement.

Just because you’ve built a successful business doesn’t mean that you can’t learn a few things from others that could improve operations. The most successful leaders are those who are willing to check their egos … and ask others… including their employees… for ideas on how operations can be improved. A great way to achieve this is to place an old-fashioned employee suggestion box in a common area… Or set set up an electronic suggestion box on the company intranet… Or create a special email address like suggestions@yourcompany.com … where employees can send their suggestions.

Even though it can be challenging to rally employees around solid operations, you can better achieve this by:

• Setting the right expectations.
• Keeping lines of communication open.
• Maintaining clarity and transparency.
• Sharing your vision for the future.
• And checking your ego.

Plan to meet with your managers soon to discuss ways you can put these tips into practice and rally your employees around your business operations.