How often do you speak to your people? How often are their opinions heard and ideas implemented? 

You will have superstars within your business. You will have people offering different skillsets and the key is to unleash each and every member of your teams unique strength and superpower to run a powerful, unstoppable team in the good times and the bad. If anything a team that can ride the storm and come back stronger is a team well formed. Allowing us to work with your people inside the business regardless of seniority or role will allow us to gain insights as to the state of play of the business, how motivated people are, where the strengths and weaknesses are and who has ideas for solving challenges faced. This then leads to conversations around internal teams for problem solving, innovation and communication which is the start of building a bottom up structure along with a high performing team and culture. 

Think surveys, interviews, focus groups, role plays, sessions all done independently to gain honest and open feedback from people within the business without them feeling as if they will get into trouble. 

How often do you listen to your customers? To your stakeholders? To your partners? To your influencers? How often do you ask all of these people high quality questions? 

I’m going to point out the importance of ‘high quality’ questions and listening as the key words here. There is a BIG different between asking closed and low quality questions – such as ‘are you happy with the service / product?’ The answer that you will get to this will likely be short and nondescript. Change this questions to ‘how do our services / products serve you?’ and you will get an open answer with likely a descriptive element to the answer of which will give you insights. The listening part is to actually listen to the language used in order to gain insights and most importantly action points to then put into practice for the good of the business. The more we listen, the more we can achieve. Our customers and the wider people who interact with our business are the ones who can give honest feedback and ideas to allow us to improve and innovate what we are doing. The engagement itself also acts as relationship building to keep these people close by sending the message that their experience and thoughts matter, so much so that we / the company will be making changes in line with these views to continually put customers and their experience first. 

Think interviews with clients, focus groups, surveys sent out and analysis of the results all done independently so that clients are as honest and forthcoming as possible.

How often do you share client feedback to your people across all teams? How often do you communicate the strategic direction, vision, values, changes, insights from sales visits/ calls, promotions, marketing etc. The list goes on here. 

Communicating with the team on learnings from clients, patterns etc along with communicating on strategic and tactical decisions is essential and often overlooked. Your people inside the business are everything. They are the make or break of the business as without them, there would be no business and so even if the first two in and out is achieved this one is the one that can often be overlooked and is the one that can make the biggest change. This is the action point, the implementation of getting your people 100% or as close to 100% on board through clarity, accountability and measurables. The final part of this that is another hugely overlooked area is celebration of successes. Finding a way for your people across the board to be aware of the successes in the business and to mark these through a celebration no matter how big or small can seriously increase motivation, performance and a sense of belonging in the workplace. 

Think  communication programmes / platforms, scheduled team sessions / events, linking values and behaviours within 121s and performance reviews, internal initiatives / programmes / projects, celebration marks for different things within the business.

So in summary, it starts inside your business with your people, includes reaching outside of the business and ends inside your business with your people.