Your company is only as strong as your
employees, and one of your biggest priorities as a business owner should be to
develop, build and empower your staff. Investing in the creation of a high-performance
culture will maximize your human capital and help you reach key
objectives. This insight will help you create a competitive advantage
over your talent, the most valuable resource you have.
Encourage Collaboration
Work environments that operate in
isolation are counter-productive, creating a gap with knowledge-sharing across the organization. If
your business’s departments function as essentially smaller companies with
their own decentralized HR, communication and marketing efforts, take steps to
build a shared service or to consolidate those efforts to encourage
collaboration.
You can also foster collaboration by
assigning projects that require multiple skill sets or resources. This helps
bridge gaps in knowledge, and the result is a more collaborative, impactful
solution.
Set Communication Standards
Keep your entire team informed by
scheduling weekly or monthly meetings. Be intentional with your time, and focus
on creating a valuable discourse. Share insights, have
meaningful debates, plan a team-building exercise, highlight accomplishments
and talk about your vision for the future. Finish off the meeting with an open
forum so all staff members can engage with your company’s leadership team.
Give Responsibility and Authority
To create a high-performance work culture,
you need to empower employees to demonstrate their capabilities. This means
giving them the authority to make decisions and take progressive responsibility
for projects. Giving
more responsibility breeds trust and develops confidence in your team
members, and as a consequence, they will work together more productively and
hold themselves more accountable to create results.
Seek Out Talent
A high-performance work environment is
self-sufficient. Your employees assume many responsibilities, people play to
their strengths and you cut out redundant effort and time. When it is time for
your team to grow, seek out those that have characteristics that vibe with this
environment. Candidates should of course have the working knowledge it takes to
perform the job, but they should also have patterns of problem solving, good
communication skills, ambition and curiosity. Unlike skills, these
characteristics cannot easily be taught.
Cultivating a high-performance culture for
your business will help your company weather any storm. When employees work in
a culture of initiative, collaboration, communication and accountability, they
have a renewed confidence in their own abilities and the future of the company.
This will motivate your team to take the extra steps needed to help your
business reach new heights.
