Building and Retaining Your Team

Building and Retaining Your Team

Your people are your biggest asset.

Having the right people in the right jobs will be critical to the ongoing success of your Strategic Plan.

A great strategy without the right management team in place to manage your day-to-day operations is unlikely to achieve your desired outcomes.

Ultimately you want to be able to build a great team of smart people, and you want to equip them with the tools and motivation they need to grow and succeed personally, whilst helping your business to succeed.

As you are probably aware, if your business is just a one-man band, you don’t really have a business at all, you’ve got a job where you work for yourself. And that’s more than enough for a lot of people.

But if you really want to grow your business, hiring someone is the start of something bigger and should be one of the most exciting things you do as a business leader.

Building and retaining your team

A management team is defined as a group that shares information, makes decisions, and wins or loses together.

But you must make sure that all members of your management team are treated equally. If some people can win while others lose, you don’t have a team, and business performance can suffer.

Having a healthy debate is a good way to sort out competing objectives and allocate resources.

Advertising to attract the right person.

Choosing, hiring, and retaining the best people is a key aspect of building a thriving business. Getting the right fit is important.

There are many ways to search for and recruit talent, and they all have their positives and negatives. Ideally you want to find a talent pool, a place where people who have the specific skills and qualifications your business is looking for.

So, for example, if you are seeking a suitably qualified accounting professional, they may currently be in an accounting firm, or in a business similar to yours but slightly smaller, so might see your advertisement  as an opportunity to go to the next level on their career path.

So, your ad. should be defined in terms of exactly what your business needs right now, not just a job title. Using that specific requirement will attract targeted people more effectively than advertising for a Finance Manager, or CFO.

 Recruiting Firms

Professional recruitment firms specialising in finance and accounting positions will have an abundance of qualified people on their database, so you need to clearly define the person your business needs, not the person the agency wants you to employ.

They will normally do the initial interviews for candidates and send you a short-list to interview.

That does save you from having to do that, but can be expensive. Their fees are normally between 10 and 25% of the salary being offered, depending on the seniority of the role.

You will also have to pay for an ad. placement, because placing an ad will attract a lot of new candidates, they will add to their database-a win/win for them!

LinkedIn

 LinkedIn has become the number 1 platform for attracting new talent to white collar jobs from clerical to CEO’s.

It now has over 700 million active users. LinkedIn users are typically in their 40’s or older, they are white collar professionals and have college degrees. The ideal population for corporate recruiters.

Peer Networks

The proven number one way to recruit the right person is to get a recommendation from someone you know. Your peer networks.

The 2 big advantages of that are,

• Firstly, they know the person they recommend and their personality traits, and whether they will be a good fit for your culture.
• Secondly, there is no way they will recommend someone unless they are confident in their ability to do the job. The risk of loss of face with you and other network colleagues would be too high a risk to take.

Candidate Interviews

When you interview them ask them about their previous roles, their skills, strengths and weaknesses (we all have weaknesses).

Let the candidate do the talking. You ask the right questions then stop and listen:

“Tell me about yourself, what do you bring? How can you help my business?”

Don’t hesitate to bring them back for a second interview. That shows them you are seriously interested in them, and when they attend, that they are interested in you and your business.

Once you have a shortlist make a point of contacting at least 2 of their referees to get feedback on key elements of their skills, work-ethic and personality.

The Rules and Regulations

Your employees will be covered by laws, regulations, union awards, covering their rights and obligations and yours.

You must understand and comply with them, and there are legislative provisions and manuals available from Government departments, unions and industry bodies that spell out exactly what your employees and your rights and obligations are.

Retaining Your People

The most important factor for retaining your key talent is almost always their relationship with their direct supervisor or manager. People don’t leave bad companies; they leave lousy managers.

Secondly, for privately held small and medium businesses, people need to see a viable career path with potential increased responsibilities and compensation.

For talented ambitious people, working in small to medium sized privately held businesses can be attractive and rewarding because of the breadth of experience and skills they can get in a relatively short period of time.

So, even if you are looking for a person who has built their career in a specific niche’ that they are very comfortable in and you would probably want them to continue in, e.g. Payroll Manager or Accounts Receivable or Payable Manager, you still need to be able to paint a picture of their future in the company that will suit their wants and needs and make your company attractive to them.

Share growth plans with them. If the business is planning to grow significantly, their position and team will need to grow as a result.

The other key tool is regular performance reviews-ideally twice a year. These reviews present an opportunity to make sure that your team members interests are aligned with those of the business.

These formal meetings are also a valuable opportunity to demonstrate that you care about them and to give them the opportunity to give you informal feedback.

Compensation

Your Compensation program will be perceived by team members as a measure of how you value their contribution to your business. It will be an important factor in both attracting and retaining the right people.

Unfortunately, in spite of the confidentiality and privacy you strive to maintain, team members will usually become aware of the compensation of others in the business, and any perceived inequities will have an adverse impact on their personal and potentially their team morale.

 Employee Share Ownership Plans (ESOP’s).

Another really effective way to attract and retain people is to implement an “Employee Share Ownership Plan.”

Recruiting quality staff is expensive and time consuming. In a job market where the best candidates may effectively be interviewing you, businesses need to find ways of differentiating themselves through innovative and attractive terms of employment.

There is one near-certain way to guarantee employee enthusiasm and loyalty, and that’s through an Employee Share Ownership plan.

ESOPs help your engaged employees and management team to develop an “Ownership Mindset” so that they become invested in the business’ success and start to think and act like business owners.

ESOPS create a win-win situation. The employee benefits by owning a stake in the business and the business owner or shareholders benefit from improved employee performance and mindset.

ESOP’s are increasingly being used by businesses of all sizes.

The result? A cohesive and committed team that is single-minded about working towards and sharing the benefits of a successful and profitable business.

Investing in Training

Giving your management and other team members regular training opportunities is a great way to help them to increase their skills, both job specific and for personal career development.

Training should start with skills and processes required to operate the business but also encompass development of the people and the business in general.

And remember that training is not an event, it’s an ongoing process, it will benefit your business and motivate your people, enhancing their value and showing them that you care about them as human beings, not just employees.

The bottom-line; the smaller your team, the more they will impact on your business’ success.

So, look after them,,,and they will be loyal to you.

 

Conclusion

If you would like more information about the program, and how to Build and Retain a great team, you can request a Free 20-30-minute discovery call with me by clicking on the link below:

 

Click Here to Book Your Free Discovery Call

 

You will receive an email confirmation and a reminder from my booking system prior to the meeting.

Or alternatively, message me in LinkedIn, or just send me a text message with heading “Business Growth Plan”, and your first name, and I will call you back within 24 hours to arrange a time for an initial chat.

My mobile number in Australia is 0418 277 137.

My business email address is: [email protected]

I look forward to talking with you.