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Workers burning out from stress and quitting their jobs is a prevalent problem for companies worldwide. A workplace study conducted in 2023 revealed that 44% of surveyed employees suffer from a lot of stress issues, resulting in either quitting altogether or staying and doing the absolute minimum while losing most of their motivation.
For companies to retain and bolster their talents, leadership must engage with their workers and encourage them, pushing them towards greater accomplishments.
Being a business founder myself, I am responsible for employee communication, onboarding new people, and maintaining team cohesion at my company. In this article, I would like to draw on past experiences and share some principles that I believe to be paramount to empowering your team toward success.
1. Onboarding is the starting point where your employee should see transparency
New employees are the lifeblood of any company, which is why it is crucial to conduct the hiring process with due care. Effective onboarding programs go beyond just providing basic orientation and paperwork completion. You must cultivate a welcoming environment that instills confidence and that new workers can connect.
This also means being 100% transparent about your company’s goals and corporate culture and familiarising newcomers with your values, policies, and procedures. In doing so, you allow employees to clearly understand what your company is all about and whether they wish to be a part of what it does.
For example, my company has an established practice of giving new candidates introductory meetups with our founders. We call it “company pitching”. Once a group of potential hires is formed, one of the founders meets with them to discuss the company and its ideas. This is a great form of interaction, as it encourages discussion, allows us to showcase our best selling points to new people, and motivates them to contribute from the get-go.
Another important thing is to have regular meetings and monthly briefing sessions during which your team can discuss all relevant updates. This is crucial to ensure everyone is on the same page about where your company is going.
Related: 6 Communication Tips to Strengthen Your Company’s Culture
2. Maintain communication between employees and company leadership
Another big thing to pay attention to is keeping open channels of communication between regular workers and company management. This is a fundamental step in fostering a sense of belonging to an organization.
When employees feel that they can reach out to the management just as easily as a fellow regular worker and be heard, they feel more valued as individuals. People love honesty, and having ways to share things that are important to them openly goes a long way in bringing teams closer.
This sense of closeness, in turn, means that people often better understand the bigger picture and can better align their individual efforts with the company’s goals. They are also more willing to speak up and share ideas during meetings when they feel their thoughts would be genuinely considered.
Here’s another personal example: at my workplace, we do not have separate rooms or cubicles that separate employees from the management. We all work from an open and shared space, allowing team members to easily come up to each other and speak about anything on their minds. In addition to the collaborative workspace, all our team members and founders have the same working equipment, hotels and flight class. We think it’s important for everyone to be on equal ground.
All of this helps foster trust and the mentality of unity, shortening the metaphorical distance between team members. And being responsible for the company’s ideology, me and my fellow founders strive to follow these principles even more so than most of our employees.
Related: 3 Communication Strategies for Entrepreneurs Wanting To Improve Their Teams
3. Showcase the value of what your employees are doing
One more useful tip to drive your workers is to clearly show them that the work they do for the company has value and that they stand to gain plenty of benefits themselves.
What can an employee get besides the usual salary and experience from their company? Some businesses choose to introduce the practice of on-the-job training, providing educational opportunities that stand to benefit both the company at large and individual workers.
4. Set challenges and create a competitive spirit
People are often motivated by a challenge more than by receiving a salary, simple as it is. If you want to push your team to greater heights, create a competitive spirit in your company while fostering collaboration.
This might sound a bit contradictory, but hear me out. What I mean is that instead of pitting your employees against each other, you’d be better served to cultivate competitiveness against some other company operating in the same market. This would give them a unified goal to work towards.
Start by clearly articulating the strengths and unique selling points of your team. Emphasize how these traits differentiate your company from competitors and build confidence among your workers. Set up milestones that would signify that you’ve surpassed the other company in some way.
These milestones will foster an environment that encourages continuous self-improvement and learning among the team while clearing them will result in celebrating mutual successes and gaining motivational boosts.
Read More: Why Empathy is Crucial to Your Success in the Business World
People are the cornerstone of your organization: make sure they know it
To sum up, if you want to keep your employees motivated and prevent your workforce from quitting, the most important thing you can do is make them feel valued. And the best way to do so is to foster a culture that combines individual excellence and collaborative success. Make your team believe that working at your company allows them to be part of something valuable. Doing so will bring people closer and push your company to new heights.
This story originally appeared on Entrepreneur
