Good employees can be recruited, but the best employees, you need to groom. How? By investing in them, of course. Still, this is often easier said than done. It’s not as if you can just go to your employees and order them to work harder, focus more or improve their skill at what they do. What you need to do is find a way to make them do all this without them even realizing it. The easiest way to do so is by improving their work conditions, motivating them and improving their knowledge. With this in mind, here are five best ways of investing in your employees.
Improve Your Leadership
Ancient Romans used to say that a leader who is a lion makes the recruits into lions, as well. So, the first thing you can do is find a way to improve your leadership skills. This means working on several things, like knowing how to rely on the strengths of your employees while making up for their shortcomings, serving as a role model and being a figure of authority. The first one can be accomplished by creating diverse teams. The second can be made possible by not asking your employees to do anything you wouldn’t be ready to. Finally, being authoritative without being authoritarian can be quite difficult, but it can be achieved if you try hard enough.
Organize Team Building Activities
We already mentioned making a diverse team, but what does it actually mean? This is quite simple – you want your team to consist of the individuals who are completely different, so that each of them has something new to bring to the table. However, even managing to gather the most gifted individuals available doesn’t mean that you have a team. This is what team building activities are for. By playing games like purpose mingle, scavenger hunt and human knot, you can make your employees get to know each other better and, in this way, make a better team.
Motivate Them in Many Ways
Intrinsic motivation is a force to be reckoned with. Simply put, if your employees feel that they can gain something from working hard, they are most likely to do so. This is why you need to pay them fairly and provide a raise every few months if they do their job right. Additionally, you need to make room for some vertical movement, so those less money-oriented can also have something to strive towards.
Take a Personal Approach
Another thing you should do is take some interest in private lives of your employees. Keep one thing in mind though, at the end of the day, you are their boss and not their buddy, so you should act accordingly. Still, knowing if there are some issues at home which prevent them from giving a 100 percent at work is extremely important. Sometimes, a kind word and a bit of understanding can mean a lot in the long run.
Improve their Skills
There are two ways to improve the skill of your employees – through experience and through training. The first one is quite easy to achieve. Offer your staff members a chance to do something they have never done before. Sure, you shouldn’t give an employee of two weeks a leadership over a major project, but grooming people in time can turn out to be quite handy sometimes in the future. Finally, if you’re interested in specializing skills of your talent, you can always enlist them on financial planning courses or even IT courses.
In order for any business to advance, certain investments need to be made. There are those who think that this means buying new office equipment or leasing more space. However, neither premises nor gear are what makes your business. It’s the people in your employ, and you should act accordingly.