The WoW Style

Building a loyal workforce is more difficult than ever for a modern business. There are a lot of issues to tackle, and your company might not have all the right resources in place to look after both your employees and keep everything ticking over, so you become reliant on loyal and selfless employees to take the strain. Unfortunately, loyal employees are earnt and not bought, so you’ll need to concentrate on certain aspects of how you run your business in order to ensure you get the right people working for you. Read on to find out how to do this.

The importance of loyalty

There are many reasons why loyalty among employees is important, and why you should do everything you can to create a strong sense of loyalty, as it will affect your workers’ morale, work ethic, and the overall mood and staff turnover rate in your company. Ideally, you’ll want employees who work overtime, stay at the business for years, and grow into their job roles, and having loyal employees on-board will tick this box. Loyalty can be lost as the result of bad safety practices and a poor work environment, but also low pay, too much work per employee, and (most commonly), poor management (or even micromanagement). 

You will find that by investing in your employee loyalty, you will reap many benefits, and will more than likely reap the rewards of any investment several times over. You are more than likely to find that the more employees you invest in, the better it gets. For example, you can do this with training, or making sure that they are comfortable and their needs are met and understood within the workplace. Once these elements are in place, you could well find they are less inclined to find a job elsewhere and leave you with a skills gap and another recruitment cost. 

The importance of intelligent management

It was touched on above that management plays a large role in employee loyalty. You will find that no matter how many training sessions your employees go through, and no matter how much you cater to their comfort, if your management is bad your employees will not be able to do their jobs properly. 

This can be broken down into basic communication, a lack of team presence, and a lack of a visible and achievable goal. People aren’t going to work to their full potential if they don’t have encouragement from a clear leader of their group: one who knows what is happening and is fully transparent with their team. Management is key, but you need to take it one step further, and use strategies and data to intelligently work your management to increase employee loyalty. 

How can you begin this process?

As you can imagine, there are many ways that you can begin to build both employee loyalty and a strong, intelligent management system simultaneously. You are is also likely to find there are a number of features that you will need to invest in alongside this to get the best possible results. There are some specific steps that you can take to begin what is a lengthy, but worthwhile, process of improving your management skills and techniques and increasing employee loyalty:

1. Use API

Firstly, you are going to need to install systems that make it easier for your employees to work. Using a tool such as an API management platform can help you with this. An API is essentially how applications talk to each other, meaning that you can pull data from one cloud through the use of another. This can make not only management easier, but it can also make solo and individual work projects become more convenient and easily accessible to those who need it, whether they are working in the office or especially if they are working remotely. 

2. Provide training

Employee training is incredibly important. The better your employees know their jobs, the less likely they are to make mistakes. As a knock-on effect, the fewer mistakes that they make, the more confident that they will get, and this will lead to happier employees. It’s no surprise that happier employees are more likely to stay at your company for longer, meaning that you get to utilize the training that you put them through for longer. The same goes for management: the better a manager is trained, the more likely they will be to be more competent and confident at their jobs. 

3. Effective communication

Communication is a key part of running a business, but that is not exactly a secret. However, it can be difficult to find ways that encourage employees to talk to each other and communicate back to management. You can tackle problems like this by being solution-oriented and using multiple forms of communication throughout your business:

• Communication software such as project management and Gantt charts
• Meetings and conferences with a defined goal
• Days where employees come into the office 
• One-to-one sessions, and mentoring

4. Boost staff morale 

You need to make active decisions within your business to boost morale and keep your company’s employees happy. You can do this by hosting business events, celebrating your employees, working with them to create a more comfortable environment, and creating team-building events to bring everyone together. This is likely to create fun memories with the people around them, and build strong relationships at the same time.

5. Look at your employee to workload ratio 

You need to make sure that you are not overworking your employees. Overworked employees can take a serious hit to morale and affect their loyalty to the business, and you’ll quickly find it can affect the people around them, too. You do need to understand that going through an unplanned busy spell and purposely not hiring enough people to cover your typical workload are two completely different issues. One is likely to find everyone pulling together, and the other is just going to push people away. 

6. Outsource where possible 

Outsourcing can be a great way to help you concentrate on your employees and give them support in these busy times. For example, you might find it incredibly useful to outsource your HR, so you don’t have to worry about it so much and your employees have someone to access if they need anything while they are working. It can help you save money on staffing and space and it can also help you make your employees feel far more comfortable about working for you. Another area where outsourcing can be impactful is with hiring the right employees. For example, if you’re looking to build a top tier sales team, then sales rep recruitment agencies can help you get there. Recruitment agencies know what credentials and characteristics to look for in candidates and can help you land the quality employees you need.

7. Use Power BI

Using software such as Power BI can help you to understand what parts of your business are doing well and what needs help. This can help you with your management if you are implementing different strategies across the business, you can see what is working and what isn’t, and it can be a good way to see how your business is doing overall as well as being able to keep your eye little details that would otherwise be overlooked. 

8. Invest in uniforms 

Uniforms can help you to create a great sense of community, so it can be incredibly useful to invest in one, even if it only starts with a branded polo shirt. There are a number of benefits to doing this:

• It provides safety for everyone on the work site. Someone who isn’t supposed to be there sticks out like a sore thumb 
• Branded PPE can also provide physical safety for employees when working on certain jobs
• It can give customers a clear understanding of who is and who isn’t employed in your business

9. Use reward systems 

You might find that reward systems give your employees a further incentive to work hard and help them to build enthusiasm for their work knowing that they are going to get a direct reward other than being paid. This could be a fun holiday given to the employee of the year, reward point systems that employees can spend on treats or prizes for their hard work, or just little bits of custom swag that the company provides to keep them feeling fulfilled. 

10. Provide protection for your employees

Last but by no means least, you should do whatever you can to ensure that your employees are protected against bullying and harassment in the workplace. It has no place at work (or in the adult world as a whole) and should not be tolerated. Even if it happens to be your best employee (but this is rarely the case), you need to make sure that you come down hard on them, as it is detrimental to the whole business. 

To sum everything up

There are a lot of tools that you can use to help you manage your employees more intelligently and to build trust and loyalty within your workforce. You will find a range of services, software, and strategies that can go a long way when it comes to helping your employees truly find a safe space of working within your business. You can do this by investing in protective strategies, such as having a uniform and protecting employees against bullying and harassment. You could also focus on boosting morale by investing in reward systems and communication – as well as thinking about the workload that you are putting on your employees. This can be helped by looking into outsourcing and training, as well as investing in software such as Power BI and API which can help your employees become more efficient within their jobs by managing and working with technology more effectively. 

By taking these steps, your business is likely to begin to grow and evolve into a culture where your employees are happy, quality is high, and you are turning a nice profit quarter after quarter.