- Trust your employees: Forget about “earning trust”, just give it away in the beginning, the more you trust them, the more accountable they feel for their performance. If you are not keeping a buffer for failure, you will always be overtly critical and intrusive in every task that is given to them at different levels.
- Create rituals to acknowledge: If you only have meetings to discuss what is wrong with what is going on, you create an extremely negative ecosystem, which only increases the cortisol levels in the minds of your employees every time you have a “townhall meeting”. Clapping, announcing, glorifying your teams and people will be an intrinsic incentive which i believe is way more powerful than giving them a hike. Any other company can offer the extra money, not everyone can promise that emotional feeling of accomplishment.
- Hierarchies based on projects: It is unfair to have a senior person lead a project when the project is about something that a junior person knows more about; the more you create an ecosystem that allows for hierarchal shifts, the more it empowers employees to work on their skillsets and knowledge base.
- Reward consistency and not punctuality: Most times we end up rewarding people who are punctual; the problem with that is that you establish a set of values that become the benchmarks for success in the organisation. Instead, reward consistency of any kind, not necessarily about being on time.
- Break the rules: The element of surprise is something that stays with people; it creates a deep rooted impact that will stay with the person, and their loyalty will depend on that moment when you decided to break the rules for them
- Hire leaders and not managers: If you call them managers, the title ends up manifesting itself on the people too; most managers are just “managing” people and feel no pressure to actually lead them to create and execute something they can be proud of.
- Count the energy and not the time: If you only care about how many hours the employee spent in the office, you are just creating a jail ecosystem, where they come in, serve their time and leave(or sometimes don’t). Appreciate and acknowledge the energy that they spend on the work they do; i implore you to not tell them how to spend their time, instead tell them how to spend their energy. If you monetise their time, they will monetise their effort.
- Allow for slump days: It is really easy to expect a robot to function at the same level every day, no matter what happens. We end up forgetting that the human brain is way more complex and the way it functions is largely dependent on the emotions that surround it. So there will be days that a fight with the spouse, a bad hair day or even the commute can affect them immensely. Allow for that
- Create opportunities to build internal friendships: Most times people don’t quit jobs because their friends work there too. Friendships are born out of moments of fun, collaboration, experiences that are not just work related. Orchestrate moments that create deep friendships
- Stop acting like you don’t care if they leave: Human beings crave validation; one of the biggest validation is to feel like they are indispensable. Hence the popular phrase “Nobody can replace me”; that said, i’m not saying that pamper them even if they are not performing. All i’m saying is that if you make them feel like they are dispensable, they will act like they are just visitors.
