The current feeling amongst business owners is that their staff aren’t as productive or as engaged as they’d like, especially as the economy has slowed to a technical recession. Many small to medium businesses hired high performers over the past few years, in some cases paying top dollar for people in the hot job market of 2021 and 2022, and for a variety of reasons, aren’t seeing the results they’d hoped for.
In this two-part blog series, we spoke to recruitment expert and Hays NZ Managing Director, David Trollope, executive coach and CEO of Spring Coaching, Josie Askin, and Director of Advisory Boards NZ, Helen Down, to get their ideas and inspiration for SME owners and managers to boost productivity and keep their employees happy and engaged.
Part one below focuses on ways of getting your staff more engaged, the importance of showing your employees how their work contributes to the purpose of the business, and how it may be that you, the business leader, might need coaching to help your staff raise their productivity.
While there are many productivity-enhancing practices SMEs can adopt, first take a step back and try to get a really good grasp of what might be hindering productivity in your workforce, suggests David Trollope, Managing Director of Hays New Zealand.
It’s possible their skills don’t quite match the role, but workplace culture, work-life balance, learning and development, a lack of financial reward, lack of recognition, bottlenecks, and a lack of career progression can all impact “discretionary effort,” he says.
To engage workers, David recommends these tips:
- Start with a supportive and inclusive work environment so employees feel valued, respected and empowered.
- Encourage open communication, provide clear expectations and goals, and show employees how their work contributes to the business’s overall success.
- Create opportunities for employees to share their ideas, concerns and suggestions.
Give employees a certain level of autonomy in their roles and empower them to take ownership of their work. - Set realistic workloads and expectations and also promote boundaries and uninterrupted time to recharge, e.g. by discouraging after-hours emails.
- Monitor overtime and provide additional temporary or contract support if it becomes prolonged.
- Look at your people managers. Do they engage and inspire their team?
Continuous learning empowers employees to grow and contribute their best, David adds. Things like online training, workshops, coaching, mentoring, and peer-to-peer learning are good ideas. Also, cross functional projects, leadership development programmes, regular feedback, performance reviews, and development plans are all common strategies to address employees’ learning needs, he says.
Then, as well as a competitive salary, recognition of good work - whether that’s financial or non-financial - can be more powerful in fostering a sense of pride and motivating staff to perform to a high level. An acknowledgement in a team meeting or a newsletter, personal thank you notes, formal certificates, or social activity to celebrate success can all make a difference, says the recruitment expert.
Explain how an employee’s role affects the rest of the business
It’s really important to give staff members a sense of purpose and to explain what their purpose is, says the CEO of Spring Coaching, Josie Askin, who helps leaders sustain high performance without burning out.
“For instance, you could get that staff member involved by explaining: ‘This is our high level strategy at the company, and this is how your role contributes to that,’” she suggests.
Josie gives the anecdote of US President John F Kennedy asking a janitor at NASA what their job was. Instead of saying he was a janitor, the man said proudly “I’m helping to put a man on the moon.”
If the staff member doesn’t understand the connection to what they’re doing and what the company is hoping to achieve, then it’s really hard for them to stay engaged and motivated, she explains.
“Small business owners need to ensure that everyone is working toward the same vision and that there’s a clear line of sight of that vision in what they’re doing every day. Have the individual staff member’s personal development plan (or individual performance plan) connected to this idea of having a single focus.”
Of course, no one wants to feel that they’re being unproductive and not achieving. For business owners, it’s about having courageous conversations with these staff members, suggests Josie.
It’s about being curious, and asking why. It might take several conversations, perhaps off-site, to find out what’s happening and to discover what might be contributing to below average productivity, she says. It could be that something is happening at home, or it might be that the new hire has great ideas but they don’t feel comfortable expressing them.
What example are you, the business owner, setting? Josie urges business owners to look in the mirror.
“Human beings learn by observing. If you’re asking staff to do x, y, and z and wondering why they’re not doing x, y and z, what in practice are you doing?”
“When I ask business owners about the hours they’re working, it (often) turns out they’re working astronomical hours, working weekends,” explains Josie.
They tell her, “I don’t expect my staff to do that”, but if that’s what you’re doing, your staff will feel a sense of pressure and the whole team will feel they need to be putting in the same hours. “And they may not respond well to that way of working,” she warns.
Coaching may be a skill you need to acquire
It may be that as a leader, you need to get some coaching in managing and incentivising staff to gain better productivity in the business. A good coach, says Josie, will teach you the value of curiosity, active listening, powerful questioning, and motivational interviewing. They’ll also teach the “coaches mindset”; the belief that everyone is doing their best with the resources they have available to them.
And it’ll teach you “coaching presence”, which is being there 100% for the person you’re working with. There are no distractions and you’re completely in the zone for them, explains the leadership coach.
Through coaching, a business owner may become more open to alternative views and beliefs.
“We can become so stuck with our own beliefs that we sometimes don’t realise that there are alternative options,” explains the executive coach.
Use your advisory board if you have one
If you have an advisory board or you’re thinking of assembling one, they can be very supportive to business owners wanting to raise standards among staff performance, says Helen Down, Founder and Director of Advisory Boards NZ.
Advisory boards can help small businesses struggling with underperforming staff in a number of practical ways:
- As a business owner, you may not know enough about the role your employee is in to help them lift their game. With diverse experiences on the board, one member may know more about the role than you do and can support the owner to support their staff.
- The board will be interested in productivity and performance issues – they’ll help the business owner focus on these areas and require their employees to do the same, delivering better results to meet the expectations of board members.
- An advisory board can make sure the SME owner has the right processes and support in place for a new team member to be productive. Often business leaders will bring a person in, give them a job, and not create an environment around them to support them. An advisory board can help put processes in place, such as giving them a proper induction process, doing proper performance reviews on a regular basis, and communicating with them effectively.
- Business owners can have unrealistic expectations of what their staff can deliver and how quickly they can make a big difference. An advisory board can help document realistic expectations and might help a business owner align their expectations.
In part two of this series, we look at how your team dynamics might be affecting staff productivity. We also discuss rewarding employees in the right way, and explore how development pathways can help engage and incentivise staff.
