3 Ways to Keep Your Team On-Track and Productive for Your Small Business

You’ve taken the time to put together the ultimate team and have worked through all the kinks of working with your new employees. Now that you’ve established a good system, you sometimes find that they become bored or unproductive. This can happen to any small business no matter how smart or capable the team members are, and it can take some strategy to get everyone back on track and ready to achieve the goals of the company.

Here are some ways you should consider when you want to encourage participation in your company.

1. Know where things tend to halt

A machine is only as good as its weakest point. If you have a moment in the cycle that you’ve set up that tends to cause problems over and over again, it might be time to consider why that is. Maybe one of your team members is loaded with more work than he or she should be, or someone might not be as interested in the position as he or she used to be. Taking a look at the minutia of your business can lead to learning where you can improve and which employees you need to have a conversation with. Take some time to think about your business from an outsider’s perspective and how it might come across to a stranger.

2. Look into the ways you communicate

Communication is the key to any relationship—whether it happens to be in the workplace or in your personal life. You might want to have a few different ways to keep in touch. This might mean looking into developing some new ways of making communication fun. Slack polls and gifs can encourage employees to check out communication feeds more often and to be involved in the process of achieving goals. Part of your job as a business owner or manager is to help your team stay on track and enjoy what it is they are doing. Finding new ways to communicate or taking it to the next level can help to get the ball rolling again for your company.

3. Ask your employees about their thoughts

Even if you are the most attentive manager, you can still run into problems being on the same wave-length as your employees. You might want to sit down with each of them and ask about what concerns they have and how you could approach things differently. Listening is an important part of communicating, and it might be that you could be asking things from another angle or you are the weak point of the system. By asking for some honest feedback or finding out what thoughts your employees have, you’re opening up some room for improvement.

Putting together a quality team is half the battle of running a successful business. The other part is constantly finding ways to keep your employees motivated to go the distance and do a good job. It can take some time to get things up and going again, but by taking these steps, you’re much less likely to run into problems with your business in the future.