What do you see when you look at the employee positions at your company?
Many business owners will see the concrete, immediate needs of the company and the actions required from their employees to fill those needs. However, employees are obviously much more than that.
Employees make up the personality of your company. They represent it to the outside world. In many ways, your employees are your company’s personality and identity.
This implies a much deeper responsibility from your employees for your company.
For your employees to fill that role that they hold, they need to do a lot more than just address concrete, immediate needs, and they need more resources and information from you.
A Roadmap
Your employees need to understand the scope of their involvement with the company, and what they’re there for. Without this, how will you ever get employees to be as passionate as you are about your business?
Writing down concrete, immediate actions creates one type of roadmap for your employee to follow.
But with a more in-depth, all-inclusive map, they’ll be able to explore the landscape with much more breadth and confidence.
Company Culture
Employees need an understanding of company culture from the management team. Company culture goes a long way in helping you be a better manager.
When management acts laissez-faire about company culture, the employees are left to believe one of two things:
- They must ask a supervisor every time there is a question about behavior or a deviation from normal protocol.
- That those issues aren’t important enough to address in a way that aligns with an overall company identity.
No Ownership
In the first scenario, the employee has to defer to management for each question. This takes a lot of time from management that they could be using more effectively.
That time might be where management would otherwise be thinking creatively, coming up with new and better ways for employees to interact and for the business to function better.
It also tells employees they aren’t a significant part of the business. If they only have to fill basic roles, do what they’re told, and never think critically and creatively, you’re telling them they’re replaceable.
That leads to employees with virtually no ownership over the success of the company.
Allow Creativity
In the second scenario, the employees left to their own devices might be spending a lot of energy trying to make the right decisions.
However, without the proper direction, an understanding of the company’s values, personality, and goals, those employees are more like to make decisions inconsistent from each other and your vision.
Worse still, they may just leave issues unaddressed, because nobody pointed out the importance of addressing them.
Instead, your employees need a thorough understanding of the company. A strong company culture will inform your employees about how they should act when they’re unsure.
It will allow them creativity within a certain company image you want to cultivate.
Knowing Company Goals
Employees benefit from knowing your goals for the company. They should be informed about how their actions fit into those goals and interact with other employees’ actions in other branches of the company.
They can then feel like purposeful parts of the puzzle, rather than disposable and unimportant. Their goals begin to align with the company’s, and their fulfillment at work improves other aspects of their lives.
Consistently offering training and requesting employee feedback is another important part of the employee roadmap. The feedback reminds employees that their opinions and progress matter to the overall vision of the company.
For the company to succeed, its employees have to succeed. Training can be used to address any tools your employees are lacking.
It can remind them of the way they’re expected to act within your business, the kind of culture you’re cultivating, and give them the means to embody it in daily life.