Tip of the Week: Improving Your Relationship With Your Employees

It shouldn’t be a surprise to hear that the better your relationship is with your employees, the more your business will benefit. Despite this, many businesses today lack trust between their organizational levels. Let’s go over a few simple tips that you can use to help maintain positive feelings amongst your team.

Communicate

Just as in any relationship, cultivating a positive rapport with your team members is critical to making things copacetic in the workplace—even if that workplace is dispersed, as remote work is apt to do. Therefore, it is in your best interest to keep the lines of communication between you and your team members wide open, both in terms of the group and as individuals.

Not only should you ensure that there are plenty of opportunities for your team members to speak with you, you should encourage them to do so about a variety of topics, including non-work-related ones. Getting to know them on a more personal level and speaking to them from that perspective will not only give you the information to communicate more effectively, but will help encourage them to be more communicative.

Show Your Appreciation and Respect

Working for anyone, regardless of how nice they are, can be a lot to deal with at times, so make sure that you prioritize showing your employees your honest (and that honest part is key) appreciation for their efforts toward your business. Acknowledging their hard work is one of the simplest things you can do, but it can be the difference between an exhausted employee mentally checking out at 3:45 and an exhausted employee rallying and putting in their best effort to finish out the day strong.

On a related note, it is just as important to show your team members enough respect to hear their opinions and input, even if you disagree or there are reasons that their input wouldn’t work effectively. In fact, hear them out and acknowledge the valid points they make before sharing how circumstances might make them impractical.

Embrace Any Opportunity to Learn

Continuing this line of thought, you also need to acknowledge that the role of “boss” makes you the authority in the business’ concerns, but not necessarily the authority on all the goings-on in terms of its operations. There are going to be certain aspects where your employees do in fact know more and/or better than you do, and there’s always more information than any one person can keep up with. Acknowledging this is a good first step, and is best followed through actively trying to learn as much as you can.

Allow Autonomy

Finally, it is important that your team members have the freedom to conduct themselves as they see fit as they work to meet the goals you have set for them. Not only will this help them feel more trusted and validated in their input, it can often result in more effective outcomes in their tasks and ultimately for your business.

It’s on you to get the most out of your staff, but we can help you get the technology in place to make that easier. Give us a call at (205) 208-0340 today to learn more about how we can play several roles to help get your business where you want it to go.