When you first hire someone to work with you or your company, you see them for just how valuable they presently are. You likely hired them because they fill a need or bring something new to the table that your current employees can’t. But once that employee has been with your company long enough to become a cog in your well-oiled machine, something’s got to give in order for your company to continue to progress and move forward in your industry. And for many business owners, that means having your employees and workers grow along with the growth of your company.
While you may think that this should be a natural phenomenon, it often won’t take place at the rate in which you would like unless you as a manager do something to help push the process along. To help you get the most growth out of your employees in order to have a thriving and successful business, here are three tips to help these two sides grow together.
Effectively Share Knowledge Down The Corporate Ladder
According to Abigail Phillips, a contributor to Entrepreneur.com, sharing knowledge is one of the most effective ways to help those around you grow and succeed. Not only will this communication help your employees feel like a bigger part of your team and more in the loop within the organization, but it will also help them learn and grow at a much more accelerated rate than if they were left alone to flounder in the sea of Internet knowledge.
While this tactic is useful, you also want to know when a good teaching moment is and when it’s practical and sufficient to just share necessary information to get a job done. But strike the right balance and you’ll have employees completing tasks and gaining knowledge you never thought possible.
Understand Who Your Employees Are Outside the Office
To help your employees get excited about trying new things and learning new concepts around the office, Mark Lukens, a contributor to FastCompany.com, shares that a manager can get the mosts out of employees if they understand the “tribes” in which they identify with. Understanding a tribe means knowing what someone is passionate about outside of the workplace.
By knowing and capitalizing on someone’s passion, background, interests or hobbies, you can find ways to bring those tribal characteristics into the workplace to get better results from your employees. For example, Lukens states that if someone is a new parent, they may be interested in a marketing push toward infants or creating company policy around maternity or paternity leave. While the work they accomplish based off their tribal ties can be extremely valuable, you wouldn’t know this information about them if you weren’t interested in who they are outside of your office.
Give Employees Natural Situations In Which To Grow
While filling a few hours a week with trainings or meetings meant to teach your employees can be beneficial, the Harvard Business Review reports that nearly 90 percent of employee development takes place on the job rather than in meetings. To best facilitate this learning, actively try to give your employees opportunities to grow within their everyday work, including new challenges and assignments meant to push them beyond the norm. By doing this, you’ll help them grow and learn more than they would by passively participating in a meeting or training session.
To get your employees to begin growing with your company, you have to invest in them both financially and intellectually. To assist in this intellectual investment, try some of the tips mentioned above in your workplace this quarter.
Originally posted on October 27, 2015 @ 7:09 am