Company culture starts at the top and, as a small business owner, you have complete control over your internal brand. Companies with strong cultures see a 4x increase in revenue growth. Verbalize the company vision, mission statement, and goals to your employees often. As with marketing to potential clients, use the same repetitive approach internally. 

When you verbalize your beliefs, take action to show you meant it. Employees place a strong emphasis on collaboration and company values in how they rank culture. Following the five tips below will help create a culture which empowers employees to find solutions, point out inefficiencies, and take pride in their work. 

Organization is Key to Delegation

Small business owners have one thing in common: they’ve done it all! As your company begins to grow, it can be difficult to delegate work you’ve always completed yourself. If the to-do list is on post-its at your desk or scattered through email, how are you going to efficiently delegate work to new employees? 

Organizing your work in one online tool makes delegation easy. Your entire team can see work assigned, reassign work as needed, and you can add helpful tips to complete. As a business owner struggling to delegate, ask yourself if you need to do the work or if you just want to. 

Employee Empowerment Through Brainstorming

Brainstorming sessions allow for reinforcement of your company vision, mission statement, and goals. These sessions are done at two different levels: a strategic level to generate ideas and at a lower tactical level to generate the work tasks required to complete a goal. 

Example: 

Strategic: Brainstorming ideas for a new line of products. 

Tactical: Brainstorming the actual work tasks required to create the new product line. 

The open forum allows everyone to toss out ideas without work being dictated. This creates an environment which empowers employees to generate solutions, think creatively, and develop a personal sense of ownership.

Eliminate Burnout with Task Estimation

Burnout happens to the best of us but you can help avoid it by learning to estimate work accurately. If tasks are estimated correctly, work will be completed on-time without over-time.

Plan work at 70-75% availability for each employee. Breaks, unexpected phone calls and emails, ensure no one is 100% productive. If work is completed early, there will be opportunities for cross-training or working ahead. 

Complete the task estimation process as a small team. Not only does this allow for team building, it ensures everyone understands what ‘complete’ really means. Choose a task and ask everyone to indicate, in hours, how long they think it would take using cards, post-its, or even holding up their fingers. If everyone agrees, mark it, and move on to the next task. Discussing any variances as a group usually uncovers a discrepancy of skill set, experience, or understanding of ‘complete’. After the discussion, repeat the estimation process to reach agreement.

These estimation processes should be reviewed as part of lessons learned (see the next tip) to encourage improvement in accuracy in the future.

Create Employee Ownership Through Critical Path

When looking at the steps to reach the goal or complete the project, clarifying the ‘nice to have’ vs. ‘must have’ items is important. Clearly identifying the critical path (i.e. must haves) as a group reinforces the overall goal and company mission. Ensure every team member is assigned both high priority ‘must have’ tasks and secondary ‘nice to have’ items. 

Employees will work harder, identify risks earlier, and are less likely to leave if they have a vested interest in the company's success. Creating a clear connection between an individual's day-to-day work and the overall goal creates that investment.

Encourage Growth Through Lessons Learned 

Lessons Learned is a review process identifying what could improve and what went well. This should be done every 2-3 weeks in short meetings rather than just at the end of a big project. Foster an environment that encourages growth as individuals and as a company, to truly take advantage of these sessions rather than letting them turn into a blame game.

The business owner should go first, identifying a couple of items that have gone well, calling out specific individuals when applicable. Then owners should identify an item they personally need to improve on and the action needed to make the change.

Example:

“Sara - I appreciate how you pointed out unexpected complexity in the task you were assigned as soon as you started work so we could adjust. We were able to come together as a team quickly to solve it..”

“I realize I sent a few emails with work tasks rather than adding those to our system and assigning them. I will do my best to improve but please hold me accountable by reminding me they need to be added to our software if you receive an email like that.”

Implementing these five tips will reinforce company goals, encourage collaboration, allow for ownership, and build a cohesive team, leading to a culture of success.

Erin Taylor spent 10 years in the corporate world analyzing, planning, and running projects of various sizes. She now uses that knowledge to help small businesses become more organized as they grow. She moved to Charleston, SC over 5 years ago with my husband and two lab mixes. She enjoys reading at the beach, working out at a local women’s only studio, cooking, and kayaking.

Note: All the tips here are part of the agile planning process. Originally designed for software development teams, this type of approach can work for everyone. For help implementing these practices at your company, schedule a free consultation with Erin.

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