How can I motivate my employees to work better?
How do I motivate my employees to work better?
Do I really need an accountant?
Do you have wonder what you need the accounts for in your business. You get them done and you ask the accountant to file at HMRC and Companies House. Then you forget about them until next year. The time comes around again and you prepare, file and submit. Rinse and repeat each year.
You get people to do the admin part of looking after your books and they may prepare the invoices for the work that you do and they make sure that you are paid. And then the cycle goes on and it all seems very mundane.
You do work send them invoices and get paid. You prepare the accounts and file them with HMRC and pay the tax.
You don’t do the accounts for yourself, its for the taxes. You don’t get anything out of it yourself, the cost of the accounts is just an expense that you have to pay and you have to suffer the questions asked by the accountants each year.
But what actually if there is another way, a way that you can actually use the accounts to help make sense of your business?
I only need an accountan to file my taxes
To just use the accounts as something to do each year with HMRC is a waste of the best information you will ever have on your company. You are trying to grow your business, to make it better and have a better life for yourself and to be a better employer for your staff.
But what happens when you start to get your employees to really start to buy in to the project that you are doing. That when you have your team huddles you actually use the finances as one of the topics to discuss.
You use them to look at what work you have to do in the week, you give you staff targets to do this work and then you monitor their performance against these targets and you reward them when they achieve or do better than these targets.
That you can actually see what each employee is doing how much money they are earning you, who is worthy of your praise and who maybe needs help to help them realise their potential.
What would that do for your employees and for your business?
I struggle to motivate my team, can you help me?
Using the information in your accounts and finances is an amazing way to motivate you staff. Getting them to buy in to the project that you are doing will mean that they are more engaged with the work and what they need to do each week and each month.
If you had access to the amount of money each month that you had to earn to make the profit that you want. Not just a number that you have in your mind but the number each month that you have to earn with the expenses that you are paying out and the projects that you had ongoing that you will be able to invoice in that month.
If you had that would you be able to prioritise your work to know what you had complete that month? Yes of course, you would be able to see what work you need to get done that month and the money that you need to be able to get paid.
Knowing that you can then give your staff the priorities for the work that needs to be done. You can see what work you need to get done to pay your staff at the end of the month and pay all your bills.
When you have your planning meetings you can use this to allocate the work through your team to make sure it gets done, giving each team member a goal and target that they need to complete. To explain to them where you are with the business and where you need to get to. You get them to ‘buy in’ to what you are trying to do with your business.
Isn’t that what you are trying to do with your staff, to get them to really get behind what you are trying to do with your business?
How does this help to motivate my staff and grow my business?
You need to know what you need to earn each month. If continually fall below this number your business will really struggle to make a profit. When you know this you can make decisions of what work needs to be done and who can do the work. You make the decisions based on the needs of your company and allocate them to your staff.
If you need to adjust the timescales of the projects that you are working on you can see if you need to move other work around to compensate. If you do need to move a project to the following month, how does that impact the cash you have coming in this month and do other projects become more essential to complete to make up the shortfall in money?
You will only know this when you start to use the finances of your business to make these decisions.
Giving these clear instructions to your staff will help them concentrate their efforts on the work that they need to do and how they should work during the day. It shows to them that they are all a valued and important member of your team when you give them responsibilities and deadlines to work to.
I need your help to motivate my staff!
To motivate your staff by involving them in your financial plans they need to see what they are buying in to. They need to be able to see what they need to do each week to meet their targets and what you expect from them each week. They will need to see part of the financial plans for your business. You need to have this in a way where you can explain the targets that you need to meet and how they fit in to it.
This needs to be part of the staff planning meetings that you have with them and you should engage them in this process.
You need to have the financial plans presented in such a way that you can explain it to them and that they can understand them. You need to explain what work they need to get done and what time they need to do this work in. They need to understand the bigger goal that they are working towards.
The financial plans should be prepared with your virtual finance team who can explain them to you and highlight the key points that you need to raise in your meetings and where your work priorities should be focussed. Once you show your staff trust and give them responsibility they will show it back and feel more engaged as your employees and team members.
The fact is that as you grow your business you have to be prepared to offload this work on to your staff at some point, the earlier that they get involved in this process the more they will understand what they need to do and the more time you will have to spend on your business..
For more helpful tips how to grow your business please download our guide 6 reasons why your creative agency is not giving you the life you want.