Your Strongest Asset: Your Employees

It's easy to get caught up in focusing solely on making your clients or customers happy before focusing internally on your organization. However, what most business owners don’t realize is that if you focus on your employees and foster great working relationships with them, they will take care of your clients for you. 

Although clients are the ones handing you a paycheck every week, your employees directly impact your business’s reputation, and if properly taken care of and well-trained, will be able to create lasting relationships with your customers and clients for you. 

Have you ever been to your local community pool where you know the lifeguards are getting paid minimum wage? The chances are pretty high that those same lifeguards looked miserable, had terrible attitudes, and didn’t care much about the “image” of the company that they were working for. I’m not trying to make any excuses for these employees, but in addition to being underpaid, they aren’t usually valued by their employers either. They’re treated as commodities, instead of powerful assets. If their well-being isn’t a concern to their employer, why should the reputation of the pool be on the top of their list?

On the contrary, if you visit a high-end retailer that pays their employees well, you’ll notice as soon as you walk through the door that the employees have a little pep in their step and are eager to greet you with a smiling face and their warm sense of humor. They take care of you and treat you like a friend or their family, not because they’re trained better (although this may also be the case), but because they feel that they are cared for by their employers and are passionate about the brand and what it stands for. The company that focuses on being innovative and gives its employees a purpose is more likely to sustain the top talent that they are looking for. 

So how do you build a team that shares your same vision and passion around the brand? Make them feel important and make them feel appreciated. Making sure that your employees are happy and taken care of doesn’t always have to be an expensive task, and there are actually plenty of tactics that are at little to no cost to you. I have also included some strategies that do require an investment of time and/or resources, but I can guarantee that any investment in your employees will be directly returned to you in the form of strong client and customer relationships and a beautiful brand image.  

Let’s dive into the details…

How to make your employees feel appreciated:

1.    Pay them fairly and competitively.

2.    Make your onboarding, career development process, and expectations clear to set them up for success.

3.    Ensure everyone is living your brand values on a daily basis. Lead by example.

4.    Buddy-up your new employees with a tenured employee as a mentor.

5.    Give them plenty of opportunities to grow and provide them with personalized goals.

6.    Test their capabilities with independent tasks and projects. 

7.    Celebrate their achievements with them. And assist them through times of failure.

8.    Schedule one-on-one meetings to get and provide feedback. 

9.    Involve them in important meetings and decisions.

10.    Don’t just listen to them, empathize with them. 

11.    Build trust from the start. Trust that they will do the right thing until proven wrong.

What other ways do you show your appreciation to your employees? 

If you think I missed any, add them to the comments below!