What is the most critical element to business success? One of the key areas to consider is your people – your team. Having a passionate, culturally-aligned team is vital to the success of your business, equal to how you lead them. 

When you are thinking about your team, you have to consider the following; 

• Team Enjoyment
• Team Engagement 
• Remunerations 
• Travelling distances to work 
• Flexibility for working conditions
• Team Progression, upskills & growth 

The difference between having an amazing team and an underperforming team is profit and your happiness, as well as their happiness. 

Just because you’re a boss, that doesn’t make you a leader 

So what can you do if you are thinking you have an underperforming team? The first thing to do is to look inwards. Look at yourself and how you lead the team, how you handle issues and how you interact with them. Good leaders honestly evaluate themselves and look for ways to improve.

Systems, systems, systems

The next area to look at for underperformance issues is your systems, processes &  procedures.

The right systems in place can effectively take the human error elements out of your daily operations, and help your team focus on bigger picture problem-solving. Systems can also provide more accountability and insight into how people are contributing to greater company goals.

Systems can answer questions such as:
Do you have the right people in the right seats? 
Does your team truly believe in the company’s purpose and mission? 
Do you have the right resources in place to support the team and get the best out of them? 

Invest to improve

Sometimes you need to reset your team and bring in new blood, but without debriefing and understanding what went wrong the first time, you are destined to repeat it the second time. So it is not as simple as to say, you should fire the team and build a new one, but more importantly, you need to find a solution to your problem. You need to build a process to evaluate your culture, and the team, with emphasis on performance. 

You need to invest money in training your team & building a better culture and also invest time into your team. The best organisations we work with at Hatcher understand that work is important but enjoying work is more important. Without enjoyment, people become resentful and will start to poison the culture. 

“I don’t believe that you can’t be friends with your team. I believe that when you build the right team, you enjoy working with them, chatting with them, and you enjoy growing with them.” – Gary Brown, Founder 

Pay Up

The team remuneration topic is critical. Forever, we are hearing stories about people leaving organisations and getting paid more money at a competitors business. This highlights that the organisation was not paying their team accordingly. You can not take advantage of loyalty by underpaying your team members. You should prioritise keeping those amazing team members at the highest reasonable level of pay packet possible. 

Replacing them will cost substantially more if they resign over their pay. Even the best working environment will only keep a team happy for so long if they are getting underpaid by more than 10%. 

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As part of our Hatcher Plan progress, we work towards building amazing teams inside organisations because we believe your team is one of the key parts of any successful business. 

We try to live by our own advice, too –  celebrating wins together as a team, sending tokens of our appreciation and taking them out for food & entertainment regularly. But more important than freebies, we try to create an open team environment where people feel comfortable being themselves and speaking up. We are always looking at how we can improve our culture and keep our quality team members because without them, we wouldn’t be anywhere near as successful. 

Build a team that you enjoy working with, and in turn, they will likely enjoy working with you for the long-term.