Vistage Blog

People are the only asset that walk out the door every night and consciously decide whether to return or not the next day. They decide each day whether to return in body only, or whether to show up fully engaged and productive. Scary stuff, considering how much you’ve invested in them! Lack of engagement is an increasingly epidemic challenge for business leaders at all levels, and the cost of an employee who’s simply going through the motions is one of the biggest hidden drains on profitability.

If you’ve been looking for strategies to create an engaged workforce beyond the usual teamwork, motivation, and perks/rewards approaches, you’re in the right place.

Last week, in the first part of this series, we started to look at the barriers a lot of business leaders encounter when faced with the challenge of real growth.

The first barrier we identified was that of being able to look objectively at your company and ask “what do we have to do differently to reach the next barrier?”, and assuming you manage to answer than question, things will undoubtedly need to change. A CEO might have had nine people reporting to them directly when they started up and functioned perfectly well, but it’s impossible to cope with 45, 50, even 75 direct reports.

If you want to grow your company, you’re going to need to recruit leadership talent.

It’s pointless hiring new leaders if you don’t change your own leadership style. What’s appropriate for a start-up company doesn’t work nearly as well for an established business looking to grow. You can micromanage a small team, but if you continue to do that once you have a leadership team in place, at best, you’ll demotivate some of your leaders. At worst, you’ll micromanage your new leaders right out of the company.

You hired your leaders to do a job. Let them get on with it.

Believe it or not, not all businesses want to grow. Some people just want a lifestyle business, have it stay about the same, not grow and just keep ticking over.

If that’s your vision for your business, then this blog post is not for you. While it’s a perfectly valid strategy to want your business to stay exactly the same, the reality is that the world of business is constantly changing, which has an impact on your company, whether you like it or not.

When a child plays a video game for the first time, they quickly discover is that the character that stands still gets killed first. It’s the same in business. Usually, you’re going to either grow or shrink your business, but if you’re standing still, you’re really going backwards. Your competitors will be overtaking you if you’re staying in the same place. While staying the same is certainly a type of strategy, you may well decide that it’s not a good one or the right one for your business.

1. To do whatever you do and make a profit
2. To market whatever it is you do, so that you gain and retain clients
3. To look after your workforce so they perform as well as possible

Wellbeing is a concept that is gaining mainstream exposure. Both government and private enterprise are beginning to take the notion of employee wellbeing much more seriously. Why is this? What are the benefits to business and the economy? And what can individual companies do for their own staff to encourage and develop wellbeing?

I’m sure we all have a story about that great candidate we hired who didn’t quite turn out as well as we’d hoped, or that great employee we hired who left after a few short months, however I wonder what the employee would say about their own experience?

"It was nothing like they described it would be in the interview" perhaps? Or how about - "the induction consisted of; here’s your desk and here’s your phone – get on with it"!

I used to give every candidate I placed my ‘First 100 Days in a New Job’ document to try and help them get off to the best possible start and reaffirm to their new employers that they’d made the right decision in hiring them, however I woke up one morning and realised that hiring managers and Directors are just as likely to mess things up as their new employees are!

You will often find yourself juggling so many jobs that you have to become dependent on your team - and while their support is undoubtedly integral to the company’s success, they should remain your focus. From implementing a culture of openness to harnessing the power of team training sessions, mastering your management skills will serve both you and your staff well. 

Finding a happy medium between productivity and your team’s wellbeing can be a struggle - but we’ve got some top tips to help you balance the scales.

Ask a business leader what managing people means to them and they’ll undoubtedly use words like payroll, employment legislation and record keeping. Some will tell you stories of how they couldn’t do what the business needed because of the threat (perceived or otherwise) of being taken to Employment Tribunal.

Many will tell you that their employees are the business’s greatest asset but very few will be able to tell you about the activities they take to ensure their people are engaged and motivated. This is shocking when research shows that 86% of employees are either not engaged or worse, actively disengaged. 

Like many business leaders, I fill my days with activity related to planning, measuring, motivating, discussing, analysing and generally thinking about our business, the people within it and where we are heading. I spend far too little time looking after myself! Over the summer, as part of a basic recognition that I need to focus more on the Wellbeing of myself and those in our community, I triggered a major focus on Wellbeing within the Vistage organisation.

According to the Oxford Dictionary, Wellbeing is "the state of being healthy, comfortable or happy". Personal wellbeing encompasses mental, physical and emotional health as well as a sense of purpose, satisfactory relationships with others, and general satisfaction with one's life.

With people spending 40-50 years of their life and more than half their waking hours at work, it makes sense to ensure they are happy and fulfilled during those hours. Not just for their own wellbeing but also for the profitability and business advantage of the company they work for.

We all know the lifeblood of every business is its team, with this one invaluable asset directly influencing the ultimate success of the company as a whole. Streamlining your operations is a matter of logic and foresight, removing any present or potential obstacles on the hunt for a more efficient approach. Priming your team for productivity, however, is a little trickier - and it all starts with taking a look at your office environment.

If your office space needs a strategic shake-up, making a few simple and actionable changes to your team’s environment should help you propel productivity to the next level.

Did you know that 84% of businesses rank a C, D, or F on the newly released 2015 Return On People Benchmark Report, yet many beloved brands and best-kept secrets are hitting it out of the ballpark with an A+, A, or B?  Or that A companies earn over 7 times as much as the average company?

Where do YOU rank and what can you to do improve your grade?  It’s time to overcome 5 core challenges and significantly increase your bottom line.