It’s mid-July…back to school is beginning to rumble in the not too distant future, employees are restless and it’s time to begin preparing for another season of structure as the fall rapidly approaches. Hey everyone, Thomas Joyner with Business on Purpose here. So, what do you need to be doing to get ready for that? How can you truly kick it off with a bang and get your team operating at full capacity again?
Well, I’ve got 3 things you can do TODAY to prepare for the fall.
I don’t want to waste any time, so let’s dive straight in.
1. Take an inventory of where your team is at?
When was the last time you scheduled a meeting with yourself to do a self-audit? Are you struggling with motivation? With lack of training? Do you have the right people in the wrong seats on the bus or the wrong people on the bus entirely? Are there glaring holes or areas where your process is severely lacking?
I wouldn’t blame you no matter what the answer. But you can’t figure out a plan to get where you want to go without having a sobering conversation of the state of your business. Here’s what I’ll tell you. Be brutally honest. Not negative and debby downer, but honest. Those are two very different things. Negativity keeps you from seeing hope and solutions, while honesty shows your flaws and leaves room for solutions! Lean in on honesty
Walk through your Vision, your mission, your job roles and org chart, your core values. Look at your schedule to see if any changes need to be made. Look at vendor relations and any headaches with team members that have been consistent…hopefully, you’ve kept good notes in your employee check-ins! Take a quick pulse check on your culture…what are you known for internally and externally?
Once you have a great idea of the things that need fixing it’s time for step 2.
2. Build out a team day for early fall and get it on the calendar
What problems came back time and time again. Do you need to walk through processes by department and retrain on all of them? Does your team need more structure and accountability? Do they just need to laugh and play together and enjoy some good food together after a long summer of grinding it out? Do you need to redraw job roles and share lines of responsibility? Are there new people on the team that need to hear you read through your vision story and your mission statement to explain where you’re going and why you’re going there? Do you need to remind them of your core values and what truly separates you and the standard the team will be held to?
Maybe it’s just a time to thank them and celebrate and truly build a culture of gratitude…I don’t know. But so often we try to address all of this stuff in an hour meeting when the phone is ringing and to-do lists are out of control. But everyone’s attention is on their job and not on the meeting…so get your team away. It doesn’t have to be at a resort. It can be at a bowling alley, at a putt-putt course, one of your homes, anywhere! But create a time to refresh your team and address anything that came up in your self-audit.
It all starts with building it out and putting it on the calendar!
That brings us to our last thing to do today…
3. Build in structure of accountability
So often this stuff fades quickly because we never revisit it. We have to build new systems to support these areas that need help. If it’s something like Core Values, start talking about it every week at team meetings. Where did we see someone live out our core values? And have a small prize like a gift card or silly award. If it’s new processes, set up a follow-up meeting once a month to talk through any hiccups or areas to improve it. If it’s moving job roles around, have check-ins once a week to offer support and make sure the team is living in the new roles effectively and not drowning!
We want to take the easy way out and just act like by us leaving work for a few hours, playing together, and discussing things that matter is really going to create lasting change, but it’s only the starting point. If we don’t revisit and create repetition and a predictable system to live within, our team just goes back to their same old habits and nothing changes.
Address it, coach it, provide the system to live within, and then watch it come to action.
So, if you’re like almost every business we work with, your team is tired and dragging trying to finish the summer. It’s time for a reset.
Schedule some time for a self-audit today, build a team day around the things that are found out in your self-audit and then build in structure and accountability to keep things moving the right direction.
You can’t solve every problem today, but you can start building the framework to fix a handful of them this fall. Hope that makes sense and hope you truly will schedule the time for this work this week. Have a great day!
