It has been long said that money is NOT the most important factor supporting long term employment, employee satisfaction, and employee commitment. It is said that other factors such as quality life, respect, the community created and the team relationships are all far more relevant and important to your employees.
Thus an important part of the small business owners job is to foster and develop these aspects of company life. If successfully accomplished the business will be more stable, more profitable with far fewer problems, with less employee turnover, longer employee retention, better customer relations and vendor relations and a much better job done at every level imaginable.
All this by meaningfully demonstrating you, the boss, cares about his people enough to nurture relationships between himself and his employee base, as well as between the employees. He shows his appreciation and demonstrates his respect for them as individuals. Furthermore, if while doing this, the mutual respect and effective team building that develops out of this attitude will spread meaningfully amongst the various managers and the staff and line workers that are the backbone of your business. Your organization will benefit immensely.
There are many ways to accomplish this, but here is one way that is frequently overlooked and if done can be very affective in supporting this goal.
The company summer picnic, or maybe its the annual Christmas party, or perhaps its an invented event happening any time of the year and possibly repeated a few times.
Here is the point. The objective is to create a feeling of family, to allow and promote the workers and the management and ownership to bond as a closely knit community. If accomplished the work becomes a full team effort and people will sacrifice for each other and the boss and the business will perform far more effectively then without such team building effort and spirit and developing a feeling of importance and acceptance. Building community.
This is more important then how much you pay them and will yield far better results then a pay raise.
So is just having a picnic enough? Definitely not, its never that easy. Its how you do it that counts. But if you decide to have a summer picnic, here are some thoughts to make certain it plays a serious roll in creating the community you are wanting.
1. Invite spouses and children. Allow the workers to get to know each other more personally by bringing their family along.
2. Have and plan activities that include everyone including the boss and his wife and children. Sporting events, are terrific for this, silly competitions are terrific, contests are good, events for the children and some for the adults. Encourage the managers and of course the owners to play and participate with the workers showing genuine care and involvement and allowing the bonding to occur with the owners as well.
What is critical here is the personal involvement, creating relationships and friendships outside of the work effort.
3. The more direct involvement by the boss and managers the better. The boss and managers should cook, flip the burgers etc, serving the workers, further breaking down the barriers and showing care and respect.
4. The food should be excellent, showing care and respect, a little showmanship here goes a long way, steaks on the grill instead of hamburger, etc, demonstrates more care and consideration.
5. Its a great time to give out appreciation awards or merit rewards, even funny awards are terrific moral builders and helps create bonds and relationships. Small appreciation gifts are an excellent idea. Company t-shirts commemerating the event is excellent.
Making fun of the managers and yes even the boss is terrfic for creating communty and family.
6. This should be done more then once per year and could include lesser events sporadicly such as a pizza lunch from time to time, etc, The point being, the boss and managers must participate fully and meaningfully and involve themselves with the employees creating relationsips and showing respect.
There are many other ways, all important, to continue this approach to team building, improving quality of life and supporting an organization in which people will support one another meaningfully and out of care and concern, not just because they draw a paycheck.
The flip side is also real. Be cheap about it, fail to show up in spirit with meaningful participation and fail to demonstrate care, concern, respect and desire to be with your people and they will think less of you and the organization feeling you were trying to buy them off with a cheap hamburger.
Do it right and its a huge victory for everyone. Do it wrong and its worse then not doing it at all.
Have fun, play with your people, treat them to a good time and be with them…This builds team and a successfull business. call for help 413-549-2966
