As your business grows, you’ll need to bring in more staff to help you run it. While finding the right individuals is important, you also need to focus on building a great team.
To help your business become a success, you’re going to need a strong team behind you. It can take a long time to craft the right team, and a lot of it will depend on your being a strong and capable leader.
Give your business the boost it needs with the following advice for building a strong team from the ground up.
Decide on your team structure
When you’re developing your business, you’ll need to start thinking about the types of roles you need and the kind of people you’d like to fill them. This can include a team leader if it isn’t yourself.
While you might not be able to hire all of the roles at once, it’s possible you could fill them over time. Work out which roles are the most essential to your business and start filling them until you’ve got your dream team in place.
Perfect your recruitment process
To help you develop a great team, you’re going to need to hire some great individuals. The job market can be tough for candidates, but it can also be tough for employers – especially when you’re a smaller or lesser-known business.
If you want to hire the best candidates, you need to cast the net out. You can work with a specialist recruiter or a headhunter to make sure you get the right talent, or you can make sure you advertise as widely as possible. Remember to post your job on social media channels liked LinkedIn and Facebook – more and more people are using these platforms to find roles.
Establish a fantastic onboarding process
After finding the right candidates, you need to make sure that they’re welcomed into the company properly. Many businesses struggle with the onboarding process, and if you get it wrong, it’s likely your new recruit won’t stick around for long. There are ways to improve the onboarding process to make sure you give the best experience to new recruits.
Simple things like organising a welcome lunch and introductory chats with different team members can help a new employee find their feet quickly and soon start to feel like a part of the team.
Agree on workstreams and schedules
Agreeing on workstreams and processes can help make sure your employees work effectively and productively. By agreeing on schedules where needed, you can also ensure that all aspects of your business are covered as needed. There are different tools available that can help you plan out processes to help ensure work is completed correctly while providing some structure for your team.
Thankfully, the stress of creating scheduling employee schedules can be greatly reduced thanks to technology. If you take a look at the 14 best free schedule maker tools in 2019, you’ll see that there are all kinds of platforms to help you create the perfect schedule. Creating a schedule online means employees can access their information as needed, while it can also be useful for working out payroll, etc.
Set objectives
All teams and employees should have objectives to guide their work. These can be personal objectives for individuals, but it can also be team objectives that contribute to the overall work of the company. There’s some great guidance on setting objectives that you can follow to set the direction for your team’s work.
A regular catch-up on progress can help identify problems at an earlier stage. Make sure you set performance development and review meetings to help make sure your employees stay on track, as well as to flag any concerns they might have about meeting the objectives you’ve set.
Foster collaboration
Collaborative teams can bring many benefits to your business. Having a team that works collaboratively can help make sure that your team works flexibly, is across each other’s work and that everyone plays a part in delivery.
When your employees work together, they’re more likely to feel valued and engaged. You can make sure your office setup is designed to foster collaboration, and you can take advantage of collaboration tools that can help your employees work better together.
Regular meetings and brainstorming sessions with your team can help develop incredible ideas, so make sure you bring your team together on a regular basis.
Establish a great workplace culture
Great workplace culture is attractive to job applicants, with job satisfaction being as important as salary to many people today. If you can get the culture right from the beginning, you can help your employees to feel happy in their work, as well as create a more positive working atmosphere.
Many new businesses are introducing flexible working as a way to help employees enjoy a greater work/life balance – is this something you could offer? It’s also important that you lead by example to instil good habits in your employees. Avoid taking breaks at your desk and make sure you leave the office at a reasonable time. Many employees don’t feel like they can leave until the boss does, so you need to make sure that you don’t inadvertently create a culture where people are still at their desks after hours.
Team bonding can also be a great way to develop a better workplace culture. From planning social events to making sure you all get out of the office together now and then, work out ways you can bring your team together so that they can get to know each other and work more closely together.
Be a good manager
Being a strong leader will help you guide your team to success. If you’ve worked alone for a long time, it could be valuable to undertake a management course to help you learn the basic principles of leadership.
To be a good manager, you need to make sure that you communicate with your employees. It’s important to focus on the positives and be constructive rather than critical. Regular meetings with your employees can help them feel more comfortable communicating, so having regular open-door hours can be a good way to help your employees talk to you.
Ask for feedback
Getting feedback is an excellent way to improve your processes. There are many ways you can get honest feedback from your employees. Showing an interest in their work and what they’re doing can help employees open up about any problems or concerns they might have while asking for feedback directly from different members of the team can help you work out how things are going.
When accepting feedback from your employees, you need to be able to accept both the positive and the negative. Being able to take criticism and owning your mistakes will help your employees respect you, and it will also help you move forward and to make some positive changes.
Evaluation after the completion of a project is another way you can get feedback about how things are going. Make this a part of the process to help with lessons learned and to make sure all of your projects’ achievements are documented.
Care about your team’s health and wellbeing
A healthy and happy workforce is important to your business. When employees are healthy, they’ll take fewer sick days, which means your team can work to its full potential. You can bring in some initiatives that help employees focus on their health, including providing discounted gym memberships, private healthcare and making sure there are plenty of healthy snacks available in break rooms or meetings.
Demonstrating that you care about your employees’ health and wellbeing can help them develop loyalty towards your company. Simple things such as asking about their day and taking an interest in their lives can help an individual feel more valued and is great for their mental health at work.
Recognise and reward your team’s work
An effective leader recognised a team’s hard work. It can be as much as a simple ‘thank you’ and recognising the work that individuals have put into a task. Other things you can do to make sure your team feel rewarded include bonuses or other monetary rewards, or simply taking the team out for lunch or drinks to celebrate a job well done. It might seem like a small thing, but having an employee feel valued in their roles can help enforce a positive working culture where employees truly feel like a part of the business.
Building a strong team takes time, and you are likely to find that there are some things that work, and some things that don’t. By nurturing and developing your team, you can help make them experts in their roles and help them to achieve personal success, as well as that of your business. Whatever your ambitions for your business, having the right team will be at the heart of it, so put your energy and focus into developing a strong and capable team.
This is a collaborative post*
