Building a Happy Team
Your business might provide the best product or service in the world, but if your team isn’t happy it will impact massively on the success of your business.
A big step in building a happy team is making sure your people are able to contribute to the growth of your business and feel they are being listened to. To ensure this is the case, survey your people regularly, and survey all of them.
It’s also important people feel incentivised to bring their best to their roles. So, if you don’t already have one, ensure you introduce an excellent incentive program to your business.
Let’s have a look in more detail at both of these tools for building a happy team…
Survey your team
Internal surveys follow much the same process as external ones.
Here’s a suggested approach:
- Prepare a questionnaire and allow room for expansive answers
- Make it easy for people to respond (i.e., mail, email, etc.)
- Make it voluntary and confidential
- Use an outside facilitator – this will help you get a higher response rate
- Insist (and publicise) that the outside facilitator maintains absolute secrecy as to individual responses
Confidentially is a vital part of this process so people feel they can be completely honest with their answers, and not be worried about any detrimental fallout.
Data gathering survey
If you’ve never carried out a survey before, here’s a sample of questions to help you:
- Identify at least three things that our business does well and, in your opinion, should continue to do?
- What are three things that our business doesn’t do well?
- What have you heard from customers that concerns you the most?
- If you were in charge, what are three things you would change immediately?
- What opportunities should we be exploring?
- How can we improve communications within our company?
- What things are people not talking about openly, but which should be addressed?
- What causes you frustration about working here?
- What do you believe are the key values of our company?
- What other suggestions do you have for the owners of the company?
As you can see, the questions are designed to give you a full picture of the positives and negatives your team experience working for you. And again, I must stress that using a confidential third party to carry out the survey and collate answers is vital.
Incentivising your people
Most incentive programs are sales-oriented because it’s relatively straight-forward to measure outcomes. The problem though is that, unless you work in sales, you’re not included in the program, which can potentially lead to resentment and a lack of motivation in your team.
That’s definitely not what you want!
Forward-thinking companies however use incentives for their entire team to keep everyone focused and motivated.
The key is to structure your incentives around whatever your team members find most rewarding. This may be cash, but merchandise, gift certificates or travel may be even more effective.
The name of the game with incentives, is to set them so they encourage teamwork. It’s important that most people win, and it’s physiologically helpful if the time frame is short enough so that team members can visualise the end result.
With a team that feels well-respected, motivated and incentivised, your business will be in great shape to keep going from strength to strength.
You’ll find lots more helpful business exercises and tips in our new “Top Tips and Ideas for Business Growth” eBook – click here to download your free copy now.
