When you’re running a business, it’s easy to let your ambition get the better of you. You feel as though you have to constantly improve yourself in every aspect to stand a chance against the competition, which naturally makes hold-ups or inconveniences that much more frustrating. These are natural, though, and when your employees are involved, it’s important to be compassionate and understanding – these are human beings, after all, and people aren’t immune to mistakes.
Sure, you do want to make sure that your business is the best that it can possibly be, but you’re not going to get it there by yourself. You’ll need employees, and to get the best out of them, you’ll need to provide them with a career that they can truly love and want to further, not just tolerate.
Getting the Right Measures in Place
As much as you might want to be the best boss on the planet, it’s going to be nearly impossible to get to a point where your staff thinks of you as a friend and not their boss. That’s not a problem, though, as you can still get to a point where they think of you very fondly, even as their employer. Working hard to develop a trusting relationship between you can help them to feel comfortable talking to you about their honest feelings, which can really benefit communication in the workplace and might help you to work more effectively as a team. That being said, there will still likely be things that you disagree on, and when this happens, it’s important that there is a third party who can mediate the issue and address it from a rational and objective viewpoint. In this case, you would need HR advice, which should be an essential step when dealing with employee concerns.
With this measure in place, both you and your staff can be confident throughout your interactions in the knowledge that there is a safety net if things ever get out of hand. This might also help your employees to feel more comfortable in their careers, as they know you’re doing everything to make the environment a reasonable place to work.
Improving the Physical Environment
Beyond that, though, you might also be interested in ways that you can improve the physical space that they work in. This is not only something that will benefit them daily but you as well, for it can go a long way to make your daily routine more pleasant if this workplace is one you visit every day. If you’re not sure where to begin, you could focus on allowing more natural light into the space and then redecorating the workspace to contain more colors that will make better use of this light. Natural light can have a tremendously positive impact on those whom it reaches, and you might want to complement this with the addition of houseplants, which can increase their emotional connection to the outside world – something they might be in need of when spending so much time inside.
In addition to visual changes, making improvements to the actual quality of their workstations could make a big difference. For example, if your employees are stuck using chairs that give them back and posture problems in a cubicle that they find unpleasant or depressing, you might want to concentrate on improving these. This might require a bit of an overhaul of your workspace design, but if the end result is a happier staff, you might find that this is a more than worthy compromise, especially if you enjoy the changes yourself.
Creating a Trusting Relationship
As mentioned earlier, creating a trusting relationship between you and your staff can help to improve communication as a whole and the effectiveness of your teamwork. However, it might not always be obvious as to where you should begin with this; it’s something that shouldn’t be forced, after all. Well, showing a genuine concern for their wellbeing might be a good place to start, as could be demonstrating that you’re willing to accommodate them and their needs. Equally, this might make them more inclined to adapt their working style to deliver the kind of results that you’re looking for.
Furthermore, you might want to let them know that this is a career that they have some distance with by offering them training opportunities that can further their own skills while also providing you with a workforce that is more qualified and more equipped to handle the challenges that come with an ever-growing business.
