Within our previous three blog articles, we’ve focused on three leadership habits – sharing vision, sparking engagement and skilfully executing; these steps must be completed to accomplish business performance and targets.
In our first blog article within the series, we outlined how to decipher and share your vision within your team, and how to ensure that this is consistent with your overall business strategy. We then provided advice in our second article on how to incorporate methods geared towards empowering, inspiring and motivating workers, prompting subsequent engagement.
Moreover, in our previous piece, we developed this motif further, indicating what should be considered to ensure that your team skilfully execute the meticulous details outlined in your plan, enabling you to achieve your vision.
It’s often considered to be the case that once a target has been accomplished, then focus can be completely shifted towards setting new goals – quite the contrary. Rather, companies must ensure that progress is sustained and that high standards aren’t compromised.
Sustaining Progress
When objectives are achieved, it’s pivotal to maintain performance, business standards and continually improve; a failure to do so could hinder business performance and present your competitors with the opportunity to capitalise on your shortcomings.
Therefore, it’s important to harvest a working culture whereby achievements are celebrated and recognised. Positivity within the workplace is contagious and can have a resounding effect in prompting a team to maintain their standards or even surpass previous successes.
Various methods can be applied to acknowledge the success of your team and inspire your team to perform continually:
How to Maintain Company Performance
Thank Staff
People often overthink how they should express their gratitude. However, there are many instances whereby a simple ‘thank you’ will suffice.
Some might say that staff are simply performing their duties and that thanks aren’t necessarily required. However, thanking staff when they have performed well not only indicates that you value
their performance; this will often instil confidence and can make them enthusiastic to please during future exercises.
Send a Token of Appreciation
Showing your staff members that you value their work is essential if you want them to be engaged with your business and its overall philosophy.
Sending a token of appreciation is a popular way of showing support to workers, with the acknowledgement a simple, yet effective way of highlighting that you appreciate a job well done; the token doesn’t need to be flash or expensive – it’s merely a small act of kindness used to convey your gratitude.
Whether it’s a personalised letter of thanks, a gift card, or a day off, never underestimate the overriding impact that kudos can have on the morale within your team.
Host a Team Event
Sustainability often hinges on positive energy and thrilling work culture being cultivated within your workplace and throughout your workforce.
Team building events can prove beneficial in offering workers with a change of environment, whereby they can enhance and establish skills that can be applied to their everyday role.
Such events encourage collaboration and communication, with characteristics used to ensure that projects are completed per time efficiency. Moreover, team-building exercises can identify strengths within your team that may otherwise have gone unnoticed and can also establish trust and cohesion within the team.
Additionally, events such as company awards ceremonies and employee of the month are other methods can be used to motivate your workforce and maintain high standards.
Supplement this positive work culture by promoting the importance of learning new skills and developing individual and group practice.
If something doesn’t work, don’t dwell on failure. Instead, consider what went well and how reoccurrences can be avoided. Positive, constructive feedback can be given during individual and team meetings to help people learn and recover effectively from setbacks.
In many cases, failure can often be attributed to insufficient knowledge. Therefore, offer career development opportunities and reward members of staff who complete training in a bid to entice them to cultivate their skills.
When staff are using new products or implementing new skills gained from training, use a pilot programme as a risk-free way of testing their understanding.
Case Study: How Did Michelle Maintain Standards, Business Performance and Plan for the Future?
When planning how her team would bring her vision to life, Michelle asked herself: ‘How will I structure the reward scheme to inspire performance longevity and improvement?’
While many companies opt for a financial reward in the form of a lump sum at the end of the year, Michelle and the senior management team adopted an alternative stance when awarding staff.
The importance and influence of financial incentives weren’t ignored by Michelle. Therefore, she decided to push ahead bonus payments and incentives that would be rewarded each quarter, dependent on how the team were performing and whether they were on track.
It was deemed that this method would incentivise staff because there would be reassurances offered in the form of tangible financial returns that would indicate that their hard work was paying dividends. This was mutually beneficial – the team were given bonuses at the end of each quarter, while the company built a team who were driven to perform results.
For example, at the end of the summer quarter, Michelle assessed the numbers and her team met the target that was set for the three months. Therefore, she rewarded them with their bonus and assured them that if standards were maintained or exceeded, another bonus would be received at the end of the next quarter.
Drip feeding the gratuity payment and spreading incentives through the year heightened engagement and gave the team the impetus to work hard; they realised that their efforts would be acknowledged if they performed to the expected standards.
In addition to financial draws, Michelle also introduced other ways to incentivise and thank staff, including team socials, awards and team events to encourage her staff to preserve consistent performance levels.
In business, education is an endless cycle and these lessons facilitate improvements. Therefore, at the end of the year, measures were put into place whereby Michelle and her colleagues established areas of strength and areas for improvement.
A period of reflective learning was completed, whereby performances at multiple sites were assessed. For instance, the studies revealed that while the 5% sales increase was achieved by Michelle’s team, the sales team in London surpassed their sales target by 10%. Therefore, Michelle compared sales methods being used by the team in London, with her team to distinguish how sales could potentially be improved further for the following year.