Being a boss, or a manager of a team of incredibly talented individuals, is difficult. Let’s set a scenario. You’re the leader of a team of salesman/saleswomen. It’s important to keep them happy, feeling valued and rewarded for their efforts, whilst setting up an environment where they are competitive and show willingness to work hard for the company. They’re going to need to be passionate at what they do – it’s much easier to sell a product or a service if they’re passionate and charismatic. So how do you find the balance to keep them all satisfied and wanting to turn up to work? Here are some things to think about, that employees really appreciate and will feel valued enough to keep wanting to work for you, and also keeps you in the loop with your workers!
Keeping Them Incentivised
For a team in which their success comes from selling, its important to make sure that they have some sort of incentive or end goal that drives them to keep pushing to make those ever important sales. Keep them competing to be the best of the bunch, and offer little rewards as a thank you and a prize for whoever has led by the end of a given time, things like that. Its important to keep them interested, and as mentioned earlier, they dont have to be massive gestures like holidays and cruises to whoever wins etc (Which would be great, but you’re likely to counteract the sales if you’re constantly promising ski trips at the end of each week.
Be Aware and Available
Sometimes a team just needs to know that their leader has their back. Try and make yourself available frequently. Things like weekly/monthly catch ups, 1 to 1s, or simply having an ‘open door’ policy can help. If your team feels confident that you can be called upon if needed, they’re likely to work harder for you. It’s not necessarily about being friends with everyone, btu maintaining professionalism and just showing you are there for your workers, will go a long way
Keep Them Aware of any Company Perks
A lot of companies now have access to exclusive perks to certain privileges that might provide them with a service or something of the sort, at maybe a discount at a local gym, or some sort of money back on purchases that may help you in during work, like prescribed eyecare or dental procedures, or services like wernicke korsakoff syndrome attorney where they hire attorneys to work with a colleague if they believe they’ve been a victim of medical malpractice, they can assist in building a case.
Listen To Them and any Ideas They Might Have
Typically your team will report to, and listen to you, but it also helps to listen to them! You hire these people because of their sharp minds, creativity, work ethic, and other great traits, so they might have equally great ideas that can benefit the business. How you approach this is up to you, whether you do this via one to ones, or as a group, but it’s a good idea to warm to the idea of suggestions from your team. Everyone will be working toward the same goal, but may have different methods, approaches and ideas to get there, and it can’t hurt to have input from more than just one person. It also breeds confidence on both sides, you’ll feel assured that you can trust in your team’s input, and they’ll trust you enough to come to you with suggestions.
Promoting Competition
In a company, it doesn’t hurt to have a bit of friendly competition among peers. If used correctly, it can motivate each employee to perform better than before, increase productivity, and keep the morale generally quite high in the workplace. Incentives are a great way to make it competitive enough to be enjoyable to work toward, and can often bring teams closer together. Some of a few examples, in a sales scenario, could be as follows:
- Highest amount of positive feedback (Percentage or otherwise) from customers
- Most Profit margin in a month
- Phone time (Who closed deals quicker)
Those are to list a few, but there are many others that you can use to keep your team motivated, without creating a hostile environment. People tend to naturally want to compete amongst one another in friendly head to heads, so why not use it to make the work environment more friendly, and get the best you possibly can out of your team?
Providing Training
All companies will have a degree of training anyway, but having access to training modules that could potentially deepen their knowledge pool wouldn’t hurt, as most people will leap at a chance to expand and maybe upskill. There are plenty of sales based training courses that can help someone maximise their potential, and the company can only benefit from their employees having multiple accolades and accreditations – it looks better for the company, can even increase sales if the company looks reputable, and can even justify an increase in rates due the skill level and assurance provided.
Setting Goals
Setting goals and targets are good for any employee in any field really. This can be done in an already established process the company has, like at an annual performance review. It gives them something concrete to work on, and depending on how you executed this, can also provide motivation and drive now they have something to strive toward. It’s also a great chance to tell them what they’re doing well, so it’s not all ‘focus on this’ and ‘please do that better’, and allows your team to take a lot from these – maybe even looking forward to them.
All in all, to summarise, employees typically just like to be noticed, and feel like someone has their back. If you’re doing all of this already – great! Hopefully you have a team of winners and the stats all reflect that, and your team will continue to thrive.
