It’s no secret that great employees make for a great team. And that’s why you need focus to improve your team performance and productivity. After all, the performance of your team of employees will dictate how well your business performs.
But the problem is, improving team performance involves more than just hiring talented people. It requires understanding the characteristics that affect your team and focusing on improving them to reach a better place together – as a team. Here are six ways to boost your team’s performance.
1. Strong Leadership to Improve your Team
In order to change, the first thing that must change is you.
You are the captain of your ship on an exciting voyage. This means you need to be clear about where you want to go and what you need to do to get there. You have to give your team direction and keep them all moving in tandem.
Without strong leadership, teams fall apart. You must continue to elevate yourself to avoid swimming in the sea of mediocrity. You’ve made the shift from tradie to owner, so it’s no longer about your skill on the tools, but rather about your integrity, intention, capability, and compassion. These 4 traits make up the layers of trust you must have in yourself to lead your team to success.
You are carving the way for people to be better than you. Because of that, strong leadership never says “no”, or “we can’t do that”. A strong leader will always ask “how” first – and there should be 3 “how”s for every 1 “why”. Remove the glass ceilings in your business, starting with you.
2. Common goals
Goals kept in silos are of no use to anyone. How can your team understand their roles as part of the bigger picture and play their part in moving the business forward if they don’t know what you want to achieve?
Common goals are common knowledge that permeates the business. At the drop of a hat, every single one of your team should be able to tell you where the business is heading and what their role is in getting there. Elevate awareness and be transparent about what success looks like
After communication, the second most important part of your common goals is to make them SMART – Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound.
There are two sets of questions that will keep your common goals alive every day of the week:
1 – What happened that shouldn’t have happened? What didn’t happen that needed to happen? What are we doing about it?
2 – What’s working? What’s not working? What are we doing about it?
3. Rules of the game
Rules of the game are things that everyone understands and agrees upon. They may be simple things like “What time do we start work each day?” or more complex things like “What does it mean to be a good employee in this company?”
Rules of the game include your culture and values. It’s about how you live it every day in every way, and how everyone acts, whether at work or not at work.
Similarly to your common goals, you and your team live and breathe your rules of the game. The best way to embed your rules into the DNA of your business is to be consistent. There can’t be one set of rules for one and another for someone else. Everyone is treated equally and is expected to behave the same.
If you can achieve this, your team will work in harmony. They’ll walk into work each day with absolute clarity around who you serve, why you serve them, and how you serve them.
4. Action plan
One of the biggest things that we see in companies is that they have goals, but they don’t have a plan to get them there. Action plans are critical for business growth, because they not only hold people accountable and responsible in the present, but also act as a crystal ball, helping you see into the near future of your business.
The 3 key elements of any successful business are leadflow, workflow, and cashflow, so your basic action plans must relate to those. Therefore, at the very minimum, you must have a quote register, work in progress register, and cash flow forecast.
Numbers don’t lie, so if something’s working, do more of it, and if something isn’t working, then change it.
5. Support risk taking to Improve your Team Performance
Allow your business to take risks! Fail fast and celebrate. Failing is the fastest way to learn and get better. The important thing is that you keep moving forward and learn from the mistake. If you don’t make the same mistake again, it’s worth it.
On the other side of the coin, taking risks can reap huge rewards! One person can’t know everything, so take advantage of the skills of the people around you. Invite people to come to the table with ideas and allow freedom of speech, as long as it’s meaningful and in line with your rules of the game.
People who feel like they have no voice will leave or quit; those who feel like they can be heard will stay longer and work harder. Create an environment where people feel valued, so they want to stick around long enough.
6. 100% included / 100% involved
As the leader of your business, you make the decisions, which should include everyone on the team, no matter how young, inexperienced, new, etc. Just because people aren’t involved in certain tasks or projects doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be kept up to date with them. Share the What, Why, and How behind decision making to help people contribute without fear of being excluded or criticised.
From there, it’s up to each team member how involved they want to be. To ensure more involvement, it’s important that you foster an environment where everyone wants to show up 100% every day. To get this from someone, they need to WANT to be involved. Think of it this way: if you weren’t paying them (and they didn’t need money), is your business somewhere they would want to spend their time?
Build the Business Muscle to Improve your Team
Mastering these 6 steps isn’t going to happen overnight. Building a business is like building a muscle – the more you work on it, the stronger it gets. You can’t expect to bench press 85kgs if yesterday you could only do 50kgs.
It takes commitment to work at it every day, every week, every month. You are in this for the long haul, so you’ve got to start treating it that way. But if you start, you know you’re going to be 1% better today than you were yesterday.
If you’re looking for other small consistent steps to help scale your trades and construction business, lthere’s no better place to be than in our Facebook Group, surrounded by coaches with 20+ years of experience and like-minded tradies with a common dream. Join us in the Trades and Construction Mastermind today.
Power to you!
Stefan Kazakis,
CEO & Founder,
Business Benchmark Group