Help your employees feel important

When your business is just a handful of employees it’s a fun team that understands what each other does and it hums with mutual respect and support.

But as your business grows and the team expands it’s astonishing how quickly you get to the point where some of your employees have only the vaguest idea of what their brethren actually do.

Of course, all your employees have a title. Probably something along the lines of “Joe, Purchasing Manager” and “Bob, Accountant”. But for the 99% of your employees who aren’t the purchasing manager or the accountant, these titles don’t shed much light on the mystery of what “Joe” actually does; and the title never reflects the importance of the role to the business.

On the surface, the fact that employees don’t “get” what each other does, might not seem so important. After all, employees can’t be expected to be across the details of everyone in the business’s role.

But when employees don’t understand what someone does, and how important it is to the business, they can get quite antsy about the behaviour of their fellows. Water coolers become the scene for grumps about “that guy from accounts who is always nagging me for stuff” and grumbles because “that chick at the front desk is always too busy to run errands for me”.

Groan. The actions always seems so obvious when you have a bird’s eye view of the business, but at ground level these misunderstandings create disharmony, and sometimes even mayhem.

So what can you do?

A fun and effective way to give employees a flavour of the significance of each other’s roles is to change the job title from the template description such as “office manger” to something which wittily encapsulates the true importance of the role.

How do you do it?

1. Start by searching out a few titles that other business are using, this will help get you in the mood and set the scene.

Here are two to start:

• WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg calls his office manager the “Anti-chaos engineer”.
• Jack Daly urges people to call their receptionist “Director of first impressions”.

2. Get your employees together in groups of about 10. Mix them up so there are a few people who know each other well and a few that rarely cross paths.

3. Get each employee to tell the group what they do at work. Get them to use everyday language not business speak.

4. Ask the group to think of newly worded job titles that suit the people in their group. Get the selection written down. Don’t worry about finding the title at this stage.

5. When you have suggestions for all employees get together with your management team and have a look at them.

6. Some of the suggestions will be perfect. And so they should be! After all, they’ve been created by and for exactly the people who need their roles explaining.

7. But some of the suggestions won’t be quite right. And that’s to be expected because this is actually a much trickier exercise than you may at first think. It’s not just about thinking up funny titles – that would be easy – it’s thinking about ones that truly encapsulate the important of the role as well. Get your management team to rework the titles for the ones that aren’t yet nailed.

8. And finally, don’t forget yourself. You’ll be amazed (and possibly disappointed) at how few people understand the role you actually play in the business.

Julia Bickerstaff’s expertise is in helping businesses grow profitably. She runs two businesses: Butterfly Coaching, a small advisory firm with a unique approach to assisting SMEs with profitable growth; and The Business Bakery, which helps kitchen table tycoons build their best businesses. Julia is the author of How to Bake a Business and was previously a partner at Deloitte. She is a chartered accountant and has a degree in economics from The London School of Economics (London University).