Keeping Staff Happy May Be Simpler Than You Think

A great many online articles, business journal submissions, and entrepreneurial seminars focus on staff satisfaction and reducing staff turnover. It’s not hard to see why, losing people you’ve spent time training and onboarding onto your systems can be damaging, especially because (and this is a good thing), there’s no legally compelling means of keeping people at your firm, they’re free to go as and when they please pending contractual obligations.

For this reason, it’s very easy to fall into intensive theorycrafting about human behaviour, figuring out exactly what makes your staff tick, how to keep them at your firm as they develop and grow, and how to avoid a culture of high turnover, which can get out of hand rather quickly.

Thankfully, keeping staff happy may be simpler than you think. While people are people, and not as predictable as machines or programmed software, they tend to respond to essential considerations and will give you the benefit of the doubt more than you think. They want to make their workplace functional and their job successful, after all.

In this post, we’ll discuss those measures to ensure simplicity and effectiveness in staff management:

Correct Payments & Benefits On Time

Of course, for all their loyalty, support and investment of their skills and creative genius, employees are there to get paid. It’s important to make sure this is highly reliable each month, that you always pay the correct amounts, and that bookkeeping or payroll issues are resolved as a matter of utmost priority. With a service that helps you close your books stress free, you can ensure all of the monthly bookkeeping is appropriately prepared for, so that this expenditure is a foundational element of your financial planning.

Delegating Authority

Staff thrive on being trusted, and being given space to perform their role. For that reason, outside of the induction period or training, it’s good to delegate authority appropriately. Make it clear what the job parameters are, what tasks they’ll require approval on, and how to document their processes. If you can implement a worthwhile, logical and transparent system such as this, such as using software uniformly applied throughout your whole team with manager administrative access for oversight, you can avoid micromanaging and instead perform the right checks when necessary.

Skills Development & Training

One of the baseline needs of any staff member is the feeling they’re making progress. Year on year, they hope their prospects can improve, ideally with you so they don’t have to job hunt, or move elsewhere without desiring to. Skills development and training is important then, from public speaking courses, to training on new software required industry-wide in your organization. You can bet graphic design companies spend time refreshing their staff on the new iterations of Adobe Photoshop each year, for example. When you can manage a careful skills development and progression program, staff feel as though time with you is well-implemented.

With this advice, you’re sure to keep staff happy, confident in their position, and able to deliver the best of themselves too.