Learning from Your Employees

Building up your workforce is a great opportunity to start cultivating talent – paving the road ahead so that you can promote from within and ensure employee retention.

This is a long-term project, and starting it might have you developing a mindset where you assume that your employees are simple cogs in the greater machine of your business. However, it can be enormously beneficial to look at what they might have to teach you. You all have different skillsets, and that might be one of the main reasons that you hired them in the first place, meaning that they could potentially also offer new insights.

Utilizing Those Insights

The specific skills that your employees have access to carry a lot of weight when it comes to your output. However, you are still the one pointing the way, and that might mean that without the right knowledge, you might not be acting as optimally as you should be. For example, if your employees are in development or web design, they might have already pointed out how valuable APIs can be in improving the user experience. This might have been something that you were already aware of due to industry norms, but your employees might also point out the specific security precautions that should be taken when using these tools. That can then allow you to implement API security best practices to ensure that your website is as secure and well-rounded as it should be.

Improving Their Conditions

The topic of discussion might even be the working conditions of your employees. You might have heard how productivity is directly linked to employee comfort and happiness, meaning that efforts to improve the working conditions of your brand could have a fundamentally positive effect on your output.

While you might gain some ideas about how to go about implementing these changes based on general advice or what has worked for other brands, remember that your circumstances and staff are unique. Therefore, you can talk openly with your employees in order to determine what they’re lacking and how positive change could be made. It might be that the working structure itself needs to be improved, with more room for flexibility – while others might take issue with the work environment, perhaps leading you to greater prioritize elements that can improve mental health.

What the People Want

Not every business owner or employer will be as clued in to what the public perception of their brand is. Some might be spending too much time within the confines of their own business to understand these opinions. On the other hand, your employees might have a foot in both worlds, meaning that they could help you understand the directions you should be thinking about.

This might be especially true if you’re talking about your employees who help to operate and maintain your social media pages. A lot of discourse can be generated in these spaces, and quietly receiving information without participating can be more insightful than you imagine.