It’s January: a time when most of us make resolutions to get healthier. We like to think of January as a time for small business leaders to think about the overall health of their companies: are your employees aligned with your mission, vision, and purpose? Do you have a proactive employee engagement plan? Is your business “health” dashboard optimized to address key vitals like finances, sales/marketing, and employee engagement scores?
While there are multiple ways to evaluate the overall health of your business, we wanted to share a few of our top ways to check in with your business to ensure it’s healthy and thriving.
The Healthy Business Checklist
Make a Plan for Driving Your Business Forward
Staying focused on achieving your goals starts with documenting your goals. Make a plan for driving your business forward. Even if the plan is a short summary of key objectives, goals, and strategies. Even if the plan is one page (or less). Even if you don’t know EXACTLY how you will achieve your goals. (Yet!) The first step to bringing your vision to life is to document what you want in your business.
Schedule Employee Check-Ins and Reviews
It’s easy to get swept away by business demands. But don’t let that be an excuse to miss your employee check-ins and reviews. Check-ins and reviews are vital opportunities to engage your team, course-correct challenges, address issues when they are still small and manageable, and let your employees know how valuable they are to you and the company. Remember: If it doesn’t get scheduled, it doesn’t get done!
Tell an Employee in Need: Take the Day Off!
Great leaders are in tune with their employees’ needs. So pay attention to your employees. Recognize when someone needs to press pause on work and take the day off. When employees are refreshed, productivity improves, engagement improves, and retention increases.
Identify What Motivates Your Employees
Assess what motivates your employees and support those motivations. Common employee motivations include:
– Satisfaction in checking off the To-Do list
– Meeting deadlines
– Feeling connected to the higher purpose and mission of the organization
– Recognition for their contribution
– Compensation (of course!)
Finesse Soft Skills
Here’s a hard truth about “soft skills” like delivering feedback: they are like muscles and atrophy if you don’t train and use them regularly. Common soft skills in business include: Managing change, facilitating difficult conversations, and delivering feedback. What’s your plan for finessing your leaders’ and employees’ soft skills?
Refining Remote Work
Since the pandemic, many businesses have shifted to an all-remote workplace or a hybrid environment. Remote work provides many upsides to both employers and employees. But there are challenges that you should proactively evaluate and refine. For example: what is your plan to address Zoom fatigue? (Suggestion: invite employees to join meetings on camera, then encourage them to turn off the cameras after introductions). There are plenty of perks to working from home: along with distractions. Are you coaching employees on how to remain focused at home when kids, pets, partners, and fridge repair people come knocking?
Conduct a Skills Inventory
Consider all your new employee hires over the last year. With so many people switching jobs and careers, you probably have employees who can be called upon in a pinch to address challenges based on their past training and life experiences! How many of them have untapped skills that could be valuable to your company? We recommend creating a Skills Inventory document. This document summarizes your employees’ unique skills or past experience that you can tap into. We encourage our small business clients to have employees self-report on their skills: even (and especially!) when it doesn’t pertain to their direct job duties. You never know when that latent skill could be of high value to your company!
Hold Yourself Publicly Accountable
Psychology and author Elizabeth Lombardo explains that accountability motivates us to do what we said we would. She writes: “Putting the task out there for others to see helps motivate us to get it done so we don’t look bad to others.” What resolutions do you want to keep? Tell others and hold yourself publicly accountable. You’ll be a model for others and more likely to do what you said you’d do!
Encourage Employees to Manage Their Energy
The upside of having high-performers on your team is that they keep going long after others quit. That’s also a downside because it puts your team members in jeopardy of burnout. What’s your plan for encouraging employees to manage their overall energy state? This could mean blocking time for deep work (meaning no calls, meetings, or interruptions)! Another strategy is to encourage your employees to take time off. Ironically, it’s when we don’t think we can take time off that we often NEED to take time off.
Shadowing and Cross-Training
Many small businesses have addressed The Great Resignation by re-skilling current employees and placing them in new roles to contribute to the company’s goals. Do you have a plan in place to help those employees with mentoring, ongoing learning, and shadowing other effective employees?
Onboarding Checklist
Given how many small businesses are actively recruiting great talent, it’s vital that you evaluate your new employee onboarding checklist. Is it still on target or out-of-date? Who is responsible for measuring the effectiveness of the onboarding process? Evaluating effectiveness is a two-way street: do managers feel that new employees are properly onboarded? And do your new employees feel they have a process that sets them up for success?
Business Health Scorecard
What scorecard do you use to ensure your business is trending well? We recommend our small business clients keep their scorecards up to date and measure key things like Finances, Employee Morale/Engagement, Employee Benefits, Marketing/Sales, and the company’s Brand.
We hope you found our Healthy Small Business Checklist helpful. At Inspiring HR, we uncomplicate HR and empower small businesses. Ready to learn more about how we can help you? Call us at 804-715-1920 or drop us a line here to schedule a consultation.
