Friday 23 January 2015

How do you reward your high flyers?

It struck me again this week something that has come to me time and time again during my time in retail. It's a question of reward.

Now if you're an entrepreneur, a single shop owner (as I hope many if my readers are) then don't start to worth at the word reward. The reward I'm putting forward as the most valuable is one that costs you nothing but time.

It's the simple "well done" or "thank you" and it's worth it's weight in gold. I witnessed this week a team member being told that their work was "awesome" and their area "had never looked so good." These comments had that team member bouncing all day and their work improve de enmity than the "awesome" level that had been achieved earlier in the week.

It's comments such as the "well done" or "thank you" put into your own words that make a huge difference to your team. I was a store manager a long time ago and it was part of the daily routine to thank every team member at the end of every day. The store doubled it's sales in a 12 month period. Now there were other factors at play here, but a team feeling recognised and valued were part of the motivation that enabled them to enact the other changes that made us successful. If the team were not feeling valued, they may not have been as receptive to other ideas.

It seems so basic, to talk to your team at every opportunity, but it's so often missed. I've worked in retail organisations where the store management team are hardly seen. They are office managers, who occasionally have to leave their office to pass out a task to a team member but spend the vast majority of their time cooped up in an office carrying out administration tasks or even less. In this experience, the team self-manage and tend to get the tasks done that they want to do, and some if the less favoured tasks just don't get done. It's a huge leap of faith to have in your team, to leave then to their own devices, and not one i'd take. I always want to have contact with my team and customers and I want an employer that empowers me to do that.

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