This is a contributor’s blogpost …

 

Most people you employ to your organization look great on paper. They’ve got degrees coming out of their ears. And yet, when you actually sit them down and find out what they know about working with other people and your business, it turns out to be relatively little.

The problem is that many employees simply don’t have contextual knowledge. They know a lot about their individual role. But they can’t see how they slot into the rest of the organization. Sometimes, this lack of perspective is harmless, but often it is detrimental to your bottom line and the health and safety of the rest of your employees.

Your employees, therefore, need some good old fashioned orientation. They need to understand all the links between the work they do and the people around them. They need to understand how they fit into the larger whole and what they can do to propel your business forwards.

 

Photo courtesy of Marycat879 via Flickr

 

How Your Business Ranks Alongside Its Competitors

Many business leaders are worried about their workers knowing what life’s like over at other firms because of the risk that an employee will jump ship. But if employees have no idea what products competitors offer and their strengths and weaknesses, then they’ll never be able to make compelling propositions to customers according to infoentrepreneurs.org.

What’s more, businesses shouldn’t fear their staff looking elsewhere for work. After all, if the culture and pay in your company are good, why would they ever leave? The most confident companies actively encourage their employees to interact with other firms. Happy employees are strong brand advocates and can do an enormous amount to improve public perception of your enterprise.

 

Photo courtesy of Mickey970 via Pixabay

 

How Their Role Affects The Rest Of The Organisation

Workers have a tendency towards tunnel vision. And while this might be annoying for entrepreneurs and business leaders, it’s understandable. They care about performing their role as best they can so that they can progress in their careers. They’re not particularly bothered about what’s going on in the wider company since they can just get a job somewhere else if the worse comes to the worst.

Organizations, however, encounter problems when individuals don’t understand how their actions affect overall goals. Some people know how their work fits into the wider structure of the company, but most people have no idea. The problem is that when people don’t understand how their work affects the rest of the business, they can’t make decisions that will benefit the company as a whole. They don’t have a bird’s eye view, and so they may end up wasting time or doing things in a way that makes it more difficult for their work to be used by others.

 

How They Can Help The People Around Them

Most employees see their job as just something they do to earn enough money to have a comfortable life. But this kind of attitude can put up artificial barriers between them and their colleagues. They’re not just working with a bunch of robots, they’re working with people whose lives are valuable.

Of course, in today’s modern workplace, it’s not uncommon for people to get gravely ill. Yet the majority of employees wouldn’t know how to administer first aid. Sites like cprnearme.com encourage entrepreneurs to invest in CPR and first aid training for their employees so that they can react quickly if their colleagues fall ill. When it comes to emergency response, most employees don’t know what to do, wasting precious time and putting lives at risk.

 

How To Solve Customer Problems Immediately

Solving customer problems is something that businesses do all the time. Working together, people in companies can achieve great things. However, when it comes to individual customer problems, most firms aren’t nearly as competent. Clients will often ring up with an issue expecting it to be resolved quickly, only to find that they are getting passed from one department to another.

The problem is that many employees can’t actually solve problems in the moment because they have been told not to by their seniors. Often customers will request credit or some other financial incentive, but low-level employees are not authorized to make such decisions. As a result, the customer gets frustrated and either leaves or rings up the senior management team in a rage.

The solution is to provide each employee some latitude in decision-making. Having procedures to keep employees under control at the expense of customer service is not a good idea. A better approach is to enforce tight oversight if you’re worried that the system will be abused and rank employees on performance while also giving them the freedom to make decisions that are in the best interest of the company and customer.

 

How The Law Affects Their Job

Entrepreneurs have to deal with the law on a daily basis. The government is constantly intruding on their business plans and putting restrictions on what they can and cannot do. Most employees are blissfully unaware of these pressures at the top of business and never quite see how their job intersects with the law.

The problem is that the law doesn’t usually care what position somebody holds in a company. All it cares about is whether the law has been broken or not. Regular people have gone to jail for breaking bribery laws, even though they thought they were doing the best thing for their company. CEOs, therefore, have a duty to inform all their colleagues what the law allows them to do, and what it doesn’t.

 

How Your Motivations Drive The Company Forward

Companies aren’t based on nebulous corporate objectives: they’re based on the passions of those who founded them. When bosses started their organizations, they had particular goals in mind. Ideally, everybody in the business would share these goals too and be working toward them. But as organizations grow, communicating these objectives becomes more difficult. In fact, in many organizations, workers don’t even know who the founders are.

Situations like those on Undercover Boss should never happen. Bosses shouldn’t be able to just put on a wig and walk anonymously through their organization, seeing how their colleagues behave. It just proves that they’re not involved in their businesses to the extent that they should be. Everybody in your organization should know what you stand for and what they should be doing to achieve your goals. In other words, you need to be a leader – somebody they can look up to for inspiration and a narrative for why the work they do is important.

 

Photo courtesy of Geralt via Pixabay

 

What Your Company’s Current Objectives Are

Your organization has annual targets set by the senior management team. But whether these targets are communicated to people lower down the business is another matter. The problem with high-level goals based on statistical forecasting is that they mean practically nothing to the average employee. Growing sales penetration by 30 percent might sound like a great idea to executives, but for people on the ground, it probably doesn’t mean much.

The task of CEOs and executives, therefore, is to make the company’s objectives concrete. If you want sales to rise by a third, how many more sales does your sales department need to make every day?

 

How To React When Something Bad Happens

Employers can get into big trouble when something bad happens at work, like harassment. Often they end up paying out enormous money for settlements to avoid court. Some go all the way to court and lose.

The key here is to help employees speak out against bullies, including managers. Encourage them to come forward and promise them that they will be protected.