Building a successful business and handling rapid growth are everyday struggles for new brokerages. Company leaders must align all the moving parts of their business to ensure cohesion and steady growth.
We sat down with Laura Ann, COO of Reliance Partners, to discuss how to handle growth, excellent work environments, investing in your employees, and making tough company decisions. Here are some of the highlights of our conversation.
What’s the best way to handle rapid growth?
- Effective communication
Open and effective communication is essential when handling growth within your company. Why? Because informed employees are more empowered. Additionally, it generates complete alignment, ensuring your entire company is working hard to achieve shared goals.
Communicating with employees does not have to be complicated. A simple update email sent companywide will give your team the necessary information to take action.
Another way to ensure employees are informed is by providing the information to managers and supervisors so they can extend it to their teams through daily meetings. Once you’ve started communicating effectively, it’s essential to be consistent.
When making tough decisions, communicate them to the people that need to be involved. Nevertheless, there are some instances where companies must decide without consulting everyone. If this is the case, be sure to communicate why that decision was made between those people to avoid anyone feeling left out.
- Rely on your HR Department
HR is the core of team development. They focus on the successful development of each individual, which in turn leads to companywide success.
One of the significant functions an HR department has is to meet each employee's individual development needs. They understand the team thoroughly and consider their diverse backgrounds, allowing everyone to feel comfortable and perform their best.
- Bridge the gap between management and employees
When team cohesion is a priority, there must be a designated employee or team leader that helps bridge that growing gap between management and employees to ensure employees feel they are heard and considered.
Suppose your business does not have the resources to dedicate someone to that specific role. In that case, a survey is an excellent yet straightforward tool a company can use to help people voice their concerns about issues they face.
- Work on improving manager-employee relations
It’s normal to have issues between employees and managers. Trying to resolve them is key to maintaining an excellent work environment. Therefore, your company must have transparent and open communication channels where employees can escalate their concerns.
But it’s not just about letting them voice their issues; it’s also about doing something about those concerns. Committed HR departments take care of employees and any of their problems.
Managers sometimes need feedback. Creating coaching around specific issues for the management team is vital since it targets the employees’ input and allows managers to continue improving their skills.
- Invest in your employees’ professional development
If someone is not performing properly for your company, their leaders must inform them about it. There must be a process in place for those employees, who need help in their professional development, where they are made aware of their deficiencies and what the company will do to enhance their performance.
Even though this may take more time and effort, at the end of the day, it’ll improve your company’s performance and you’ll help your employees develop their skills.
Additional considerations for your HR processes
How to decide when to terminate an employee?
The first thing is the employee should not be surprised that they’re being terminated. They should have already been educated about their deficiencies and what may happen if things do not improve. Suppose their performance does not improve. In that case, the termination conversation becomes simpler since they didn’t meet their end of the deal.
Should terminations be communicated to everyone?
Terminating an employee is highly confidential, and it is an HR issue. Therefore, you do not have to communicate it to the entire company but only to those directly involved and their supervisors.
Over communicating in these scenarios can cause rumors and other work environment-related issues within your team.
Firing the toxic top performer?
A typical scenario in many businesses is when a top performer generates a toxic environment in the company.
Even though it’s a tough call to make, company leaders must be able to make those decisions to maintain a good environment. Looking away from this situation just because they’re bringing in big numbers can generate a lot of damage. At the end of the day, it’s not worth the numbers.
Creating a successful business requires a lot of work! But the best way to maintain that success is by focusing on your employees and ensuring they’re heard and understood. A good work environment ensures your company processes flow seamlessly, ultimately providing top-level services for your clients.
