Professional pride and ambition drive the best professionals to achieve. Most employees want to be a part of a compelling future, want to know what is most important at work and what excellence looks like in the eyes of management. For targets to be meaningful and effective in motivating employees, they should be connected to larger organizational ambitions.
Get The Most From Your Employees: Developing A Corporate Culture Of Excellence
Here are 8 tips to achieve a greater company focus on the metrics of success – which will grow employee performance and development.
1. Define What Is Success
Every company is different. Each organization has different measures of what what contributes to their bottom line. Define what your moderate and best-case success look like from a variety of perspectives – sales, marketing, customer service, finance, operations and so on.
2. Show Vision And Communicate Values
From the top-down, your company should communicate a vision and with the help of HR, the picture of the culture they are striving for. The cascading of visions and values in a small or medium sized business can often be a faster process than within larger, less agile companies. We recommend documenting your visions as part of a charter or mandate.
By going beyond guiding principles or values and drilling down to identify behaviors that support these values your company will be able to create the foundations of a charter to guide your path towards a performance culture.
3. Set High Targets But Don’t Push Too Hard
Our customers often find that their employees tend to rise to the standard set for them. The more you expect, the more they will achieve. There is, however, a fine line between good ‘stretch’ targets, which can energize an organization, and bad ones, which can dampen morale and have an adverse effect on productivity.
4. Help Your People Contribute To the Bigger Picture
Regardless of the level and role of the employee, he or she should be able to understand and express how their efforts feed into the broader company strategy. Employees who don’t understand the roles they play in company success are more likely to become disengaged.
5. Create And Nurture A Culture Of Ownership
Encouraging your employees think and act like an “owner” of their projects helps them feel empowered with the freedom to decide and act. We find that not only does this support efforts to ensure accountability, it is a great approach to identify and develop your companies top performers!
6. Transparency Is Key
While respecting the confines of what you are able to reveal, it can be very motivational for employees when they feel ‘in the loop’. By sharing more KPIs and targets with employees, you can increase their sense of ownership. While administrators can choose what types of information and goals are communicated, the Sprigg performance management software was designed with open dialogue in mind.
7. Get Engaged
We talk A LOT about engagement at Sprigg. That’s not because we’re obsessed with wedlock but because we believe the other kind of engagement is fundamental to performance. Simply put, employees who are engaged are happier and so tend to put their all into their job. Often they even have the drive to give more than is required because they feel that they work in a company which they related to and, hopeful recognizes their successes.
Motivating employees and keeping them connected with values and objectives is an art form. The leaders must be able use stories to motivate their employees to achieve more than they thought possible.
8: Is That A Success Up Ahead? Lets Go!
Celebrate milestones when they are reached. Acknowledging and rewarding an employee’s achievements can boost morale and strengthen momentum. This is an old practice within certain departments (such as Sales) and there are lots of ways to roll out a culture of recognition to all areas of the company.
Tell us what you think makes for successful companies.
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