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Engaged employees aren’t just more productive, they have better attendance, lower turnover and approach each day with grit and enthusiasm. Many businesses have tried a wide range of strategies to improve employee engagement, including profit-sharing programs. They offer equity, assuming that employees will be more invested because they technically own a small part of the company. But studies have shown that stocks aren’t enough to make employees think like owners. The problem is that while you worry about cash flow, your employees worry about project deadlines. While you worry about company culture, your employees worry about keeping their biggest client happy. You worry about growing your agency, and your employees worry about training the new guy. As an owner, your priority is always the big picture—making sure that the business maintains healthy growth over the long term. Your employees, however, are stuck in the daily demands of their specific role. They can’t think like owners because they’re treated like employees. And that doesn’t change with stock options. If you want your employees to think like owners, you have to start treating them like owners. Here are some practical ways to accomplish this in your company:
At most companies, there’s a lack of transparency into the biggest problems. Staff may sense that there are deep issues that CEOs and managers discuss behind closed doors, like unhappy employees or unmet quotas. Too often, those in leadership positions try to keep these problems quiet so everyone focuses on the positive and keeps moving ahead. It’s tempting to keep big, company-wide problems to yourself so your employees don’t get the idea that the company is experiencing trouble. Inevitably, this kind of “positive thinking” keeps your team in the dark and perpetuates a culture of ignoring problems rather than solving them. Your team can’t think about the big picture if they don’t see the full picture.
How often should you really communicate with your team?
Staying connected is one of the most important requirements for happy teams and productive teamwork. Finding your sweet spot for interaction frequency might take a little bit of trial and error — especially now that our ways have working have changed, and your ideal interaction rhythms might have changed with it — but if you devote the time to getting it right, it’ll pay off: with happier, more productive, more cohesive teams.
Don’t be afraid to show your employees the big-picture problems so they understand how much you value their problem-solving skills. They can practice thinking like an owner and start growing into a leadership role while you benefit from several heads working on your toughest problem, rather than just one. Here are just a few ways to empower your teams to solve problems:
Team members can’t help solve problems if they don’t know they exist. While it might be terrifying to shine a light on your company’s issues, it will help unite your team around a singular purpose. The team will be more invested in the company as a whole rather than just their own problems, increasing team cohesion and loyalty.
One of the biggest differentiators between employees and managers is the ability to make decisions. When companies grow out of a flat structure, they often create tiers to separate the decision-makers from the doers. So their structure looks something like this:
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People in leadership positions make decisions [blue], while employees execute [yellow] Execution is often given lower value in the hierarchy, so it’s tempting to use this structure as an opportunity to cut down on salary costs. But this structure means that the majority of your workforce is being treated like cogs in the machine. Employees aren’t compelled to think like owners because they don’t get a shot at making even basic decisions. Conversely, people in management are making decisions to improve execution, but they don’t deal with the day-to-day, so their decisions aren’t grounded in real problems. To get everyone at your company to think like an owner, you have to eliminate this divide. Give everyone an opportunity to contribute to the decisions being made and partake in the execution.
Apple uses a Directly Responsible Individual (DRI) model, which means they give their employees ownership over problems. Each meeting at Apple ends with action items assigned to one employee. The DRI isn’t responsible for just getting a task done, they’re responsible for figuring out the best way to deal with the problem. At a marketing agency, for example, it might be tempting to get a general manager to oversee campaigns and smooth over problems with clients. When a client complains about getting work that was sub-par quality, a manager can talk to the client to learn what went wrong and tell their employee precisely what to do to fix the campaign. Under the DRI, model, however, the person who created that campaign would be responsible for fixing it and interfacing with the client themselves. This creates a structure in which management and execution aren’t separate responsibilities–each job involves both decision-making and taking action on those decisions. As an employee grows in the company, it’s simply the scope of that decision that changes.
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All the people in the company are doing both decision-making and execution This lets every person in the company—from the CEO down through the office manager—own their work. They’re practising the decision-making skills necessary to think like an owner and executing on them. Tactically, this means:
Breaking away from the traditional top-down structure where managers make all the decisions is simply a matter of relinquishing control. It means allowing your employees to start making decisions early, so that they can learn by doing, just like owners.
Employees who aren’t in management positions don’t think like owners because they feel like their opinion isn’t as valuable as the folks who have been around for a while. But if you want everyone to be engaged from day one, you need to give them a seat at the table. Employees who feel like their opinions make a difference in their company feel more invested in its success. Also, it sets a precedent for a feedback-driven environment, in which every person is growing and improving.
It’s not enough to simply ask your employees their opinions on an ad hoc basis—you need a process that helps you collect feedback and implement it systematically. A recent report from Quantum Workplace found that employees who received consistent feedback from a manager are 12 times more likely to be considered engaged the following year, yet only 13 percent of employees receive regular progress updates. Without this commitment to ongoing feedback, not only will you lose valuable information, your employees will feel like the feedback is a simple formality that isn’t being taken seriously. At Teamwork.com, CEO Peter Coppinger is collecting employee feedback more regularly in order to maximize team happiness. Here are the tools he uses to listen to individual perspectives in a rapidly-growing company:
Disengaged employees cost American businesses an estimated $550 billion a year—and direct monetary losses are only one part of that number. Disengagement can create a negative company culture, which can lead to poor customer service, high turnover and lower productivity. But according to Francesca Gino, Harvard Business School professor and motivation expert, empowering your employees to think like owners is a hedge against disengagement. Not only does an ownership mentality make the individual a better and more invested employee—they’re also more likely to positively influence everyone around them. If you get employees to think like owners, they’ll be self-motivated to grow your company, and produce high-quality work every day.
How to express gratitude to your team
And while the workplace is the perfect place to put your gratitude into practice — who better to thank than the people who work alongside you for one-third of almost every day, helping you to get things done? — sometimes it can be tricky to know how to express your appreciation without seeming unprofessional. Here’s how to give thanks to the people who deserve it, every day, all year round.
