Every business has to start somewhere. If you’re used to operating as a sole trader, it can be a big adjustment to hire and manage employees. But hiring employees is an important step in any growing business.
Employees will help you to manage more employees, a higher workload, and can boost profits and productivity. They can also pick up the aspects of running a business that you don’t excel at or enjoy.
Of course, employees bring their own complications and difficulties. If your employees aren’t able to work together as a team, then productivity can suffer, rather than improving.
If you want to get the most out of your employees, you need to be able to manage them and help them work together as a team. Here’s how you can manage that effectively.
Hiring The Right People
If you want to build a great team, you need the best building blocks and materials that you can find. So, this means hiring the right people.
The hiring process should start long before you even put out a job description, let alone hire your first employees. The first thing to do is define the role you need filled, and whether you need an employee at all.
While your first instinct to fill a specific role might be to hire a dedicated employee, a better option could be to hire a freelancer or outsource the task to another company. Why would this be the better option?
The initial cost of hiring a freelancer or outsourcing might be higher, but you don’t have to worry about employee insurance, taxes, or other issues. Also, while a task might be essential, it might not be large enough to require a full-time employee. For example, if you need someone to do your taxes, it’s better to outsource the task to a freelancer or consultant than hire a dedicated accountant or expect an unqualified employee to do it.
But let’s say that you think the role requires an employee? Well, in this case, you still need to carefully define the role for future employees. This will help you to write an appropriate job description and work out acceptable pay, as well as figure out the skills and qualifications you will need from a potential employee.
Once the job description is sorted, you can more effectively screen potential candidates for interviewing.
One common piece of advice when hiring is to “hire slow, fire fast.” Essentially, this means that you should take your time when hiring your employees. You need to make sure they’ll be a good fit for the role you have intended for them, as well as a good fit for the team as a whole.
Communicating With Your Team
You can’t have a good team without good communication. For some businesses, this comes more naturally than others. If you’re all in the same office, communication will flow.
But if you work in an online business, natural communication can be more tricky. Running an online business does have some benefits. You save money on running costs, as you don’t need to rent or maintain an office space. Also, you aren’t tied to a specific location for customers or employees, which means you can be more flexible.
But one of the common struggles of running an online business is that you don’t have this easy, natural communication. Thankfully, modern technology smooths this potential issue over.
Instant messaging systems and email all allow employees and clients to communicate simple ideas relatively smoothly. For some people, writing down communication is more effective than listening to it, so it’s useful to have a paper trail anyway. Online workspaces can provide a platform for smooth, natural communication.
If you do like the face-to-face approach, you can always use video conferencing to have a similar kind of meeting. You may still have to time it according to different schedules and time zones, but it’s relatively easy to arrange and allows the kind of communication that you need to run a business and build a team.
Team Building and Morale
Unfortunately, you can’t just throw a group of people together and expect them to act as a team from the get go. Sometimes, people are able to naturally get on and work together without too much work, but more often than not, you will have teething problems.
Uniforms are a good way to help a team to feel united. You can also use ID badges which are good for both unity and security. Always look for the best places for badge printing, so you have high quality and professional badges for your employees. This is important for your staff and can impress your customers.
But most of the team building tasks will have to happen over time. When hiring new employees, think about how they fit in as well as how qualified they are. Soft skills can be just as important as hard skills, especially when it comes to morale.
Encourage employees to get on with each other and work together. You can arrange team building activities and events to help your staff to get to know each other better. When you know the people you work with, you naturally pick up the best ways to get on with them and work as a team.
As a manager, it’s up to you to keep an eye on employee morale. Morale isn’t just important because it makes a workplace more or less fun. It can impact productivity and work quality.
If your employees enjoy their work, they are more motivated to go the extra mile, especially if they feel that the company will be loyal to them in turn. On the other hand, low morale can lead to employees looking for greener pastures. Fair pay and high morale mean happy and productive employees, which leads to great results for you.
Building a team might not be easy, but it’s absolutely worth putting in the extra effort.
You Need to Think of Their Future
In a way, it seems as if more and more business owners are thinking only of their future and not the future of their employees. Just take a look at all the layoffs that so many of these businesses are doing in the name of profits, greed, and giving shareholders what they want. So, with that said, it’s not just your future, but it’s the future of each individual team member, too. If you truly want to encourage them to be a team, then they need to feel as if their future is safe.
You have to think about their financial stability, their future payment rights, their retirement, and how they can support themselves and their family. They are human; they have their own story, their own journey, their own life, and they’re not just some machine that’s helping your business. So, make sure you are truly thinking of their future and their livelihood.