BOOST Employee Loyalty | Transform Your Team in 6 Minutes

Hi, I'm Evan Carmichael. Welcome to another edition of #AskEvan. In today's question, I'm going to answer a question from Amir, who's a Facebook reader, who asked about how can he make his team stay loyal and motivated. And this is a huge problem that a lot of entrepreneurs face once they start to build beyond themselves. If it's just you, then you got to keep yourself motivated. But when you build beyond yourself, and you have to build beyond yourself if you want to build a growing successful company, then a huge challenge is keeping your team motivated and loyal. It's so hard to train new people and find new people that if you get the right person to come into your company, you want to keep them for as long as you can, hopefully forever. So there's a couple of ways to do it. The first thing is you want to make sure you're tying their passion into their job role at your company. Excited about the vision of your business, they like the industry that you're in. You want to tie what they're really interested in learning and put that into their job description. So you want, you know, your sales guy to really love sales, and that's what he breathes, lives and breathes and loves doing. You want your programmer to love programming, right? So you want to match up their interests with their skills. And sounds maybe obvious, but in a lot of entrepreneur businesses, a lot of small businesses, people are forced to do a lot of things And you're often stretched to do things that you're not excited about. And if people are doing things that they're not passionate or excited about for too long, then they start to lose interest. They don't, you know, they're not as productive, they're not as motivated, and they're not as loyal to you. So you want to try to tap into what they're really excited about. In my business, what I try to do is I meet with everybody on my team quarterly and ask them what they like about their job, what they don't like about their job. We try to look for ways to automate or outsource the things that they don't really like doing. And things that they're excited about or want to try and learn about, we give them a little bit of rope to be able to do that. So we encourage them to come up with ideas for our business that they want to work on beyond their normal job description. And that helps win loyalty, and since the project is their idea, they're really motivated to want to do it and keep going. We found that that really helps us in terms of being able to go out there and attract a talented workforce. Next thing is be nice. You know, a lot of people have bad bosses and that's why they quit their jobs or try to move on to another opportunity. So be nice, you know, show them respect, show them that, you know, they're appreciated in the business. It's surprising how few people actually do that and take the time to show them, you know, that you really appreciate the work that they're doing and you're giving them a workplace that they feel accepted in and love coming to every day. A lot of times entrepreneurs are so tied up and busy in what they're doing and so stressed out about growing their business that that feeds on to your employees and your team as well. So you gotta, you know, make sure that they're happy doing what they're doing. It's a good culture and a good office that people want to come and work for every day. If you really love what you're doing and you love your team and, you know, you love the culture at a company, it's really hard to want to leave, and it's really hard to be unproductive and unmotivated. So you want to try to create that culture as much as you can. And the last thing that I found that really helps is you want to try to tie in the day-to-day work of your team into the bigger picture. In some positions like sales, it's easy enough because they see that they're making money for the business and they see the sales numbers coming in and they get that gratification. Where a lot of your other team, they may find it harder. So if you have people on your admin team or programmers or, you know, other, other roles within the business, It can be really hard for them because they, they only see and breathe and live the day-to-day grind that they're going through, you know, as a part of their job. And they may have minor wins with the company, but they don't see the big things that happen at the business. So you want to make sure you tie in the little actions that they're taking to the big picture of where you're going with the company and the direct impact that they've had to help you move closer to that vision. The more you can show that the work that they're doing is helping people, the more they're going to like doing their job. The further that disconnect is, the more it feels like they're just punching numbers and they're not really having an impact and not really helping people, then it's going to be harder to keep them motivated. One of the things we do is, in my role at the business, I get a lot of the good feedback. I get a lot of people saying, "Thank you, Evan, that was a great video," or "I love your newsletter," or "Your content's awesome." I get to see all the awesome stuff, where my team gets to see a lot of the crappy stuff, unfortunately. When we have 6,000 people who write for our website, when any of them have a problem or question, they write into one of my support team. And most of the time, it's only writing in with questions or problems. It's never, "Hey, you guys are great." So, if you see the business through their eyes, it's often really bad, like all these questions, problems. So what I try to do is every month I send an update on what we're doing with the business, where we're growing, problems we're facing, wins that we've had, and I'll always share all the quotes that have come in. So some of the great things you guys leave on YouTube comments underneath, I'll share with my team to say, hey, you know, you guys, you help make this possible. It's not just me doing this. All of your help put all this together, and that keeps them motivated and knows that the company is doing the right thing and we're helping people and kind of feels that they're connected to the team as a whole and keeps them motivated, keeps them loyal instead of, you know, just doing the day-to-day grind of their business. I hope that helps. I'd love to hear what you guys have to think, any strategies that you're using to keep your team loyal and motivated. Or if you have a question, you can leave it in the comments below. And if you like the video and you want to see more, please give it a thumbs up below. It always motivates me when I see those thumbs ups coming in. So thank you, and we'll see you on the next episode. [MUSIC] [MUSIC]