It’s a nightmare situation for any business owner. It’s a Monday morning, you’re tired, you haven’t had coffee yet, and there is a group of inexperienced and brand-new employees who need training. They are nowhere near the crack team that you need to run your business, but they’ll get there.
Whipping your new team into shape and making sure that they’re ready to deal with your customers and help advance your business is tricky. A lot of first-time CEOs don’t know where to start. So let’s take a look at a few tips and tricks on how to get this group of people who have never worked together before, and turn them into a well oiled and efficient team.
Outline Your Goals
We hope that you’ve practised how to speak confidently because it is time for that pep talk. You know the one. You’ve probably had it sent to you once before in the past. It is the point in training at which the owner of the company set the new workers down and explains exactly what they want to happen. It’s time to talk about your goals. What do you want these people to do? How do you want them to be? You need to be specific, you need to be easy to understand, and you need to be motivational all at once. Don’t panic, it’s easier than it sounds.
Our personal recommendation? Speak from the heart. Be honest with them about what you want, what your dreams are, and how you want the company to grow. Share your vision with them, so it becomes their vision as well. A company can’t grow unless all of its own members are working towards the same goal. If you don’t have that, then it can be a little bit tricky.
Do Some Ice Breakers
When you’ve told them what you want, it’s time to get people familiar with each other. For this, we are going to break out some ice breaker games. Some people call them team building activities, some people call them icebreakers, it doesn’t really matter. The point is that you need to get these people talking with each other interacting with each other and doing all of those things that well-oiled teams do. You can’t artificially create it, so you have to let it progress naturally.
Get people to talk about themselves. You don’t want your employees to feel like they’re just cogs in the machine. You want them to feel like the actual people with personalities and likes and dislikes. So you want them to talk about themselves. You want the common ground to start developing because that forms the basis for good working relationships. It also makes you seem like a cool employer. That is an image that you do want to cultivate on the side, but it’s not a massive priority.
Show People the Setup
As a side note, it really doesn’t hurt to show people the set up of the office. Take them on a tour. Show them where the water Fountain is, show them where the tea and coffee facilities are, where the printer is, things like that. Get them familiar with their workplace early, because you’ll have a much easier time implementing training exercises.
So to conclude, getting a team of new workers into shape isn’t particularly difficult, and it doesn’t mean you have to tear your hair out either. Yes, it can be frustrating when people don’t understand how your business works. But they take time – you have to mould these new people into efficient workers that share your vision. When you do that, you’ll have the components you need for incredible business growth.
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