Need to grow your business in tough times? Make every employee a part of your growth engine.
Whether the company is big or small, it is in your interest to ensure every employee understands the value they create and feel like they can actively contribute to the success of the company.
All employees can be focussed on growth.
With the exception of well funded startups, we all know that nothing happens until a sale is made. There is no company and there is no job.
If you are running a large business with huge year on year growth, you likely have a big team of dedicated functional specialists who do their specific job, possibly without even fully understanding their role in the entire customer value chain. Many small to medium businesses however, require employees to be more agile and to wear multiple hats simultaneously. Regardless of whether the company is big or small, it is in your interest to ensure every employee understands the value they create and feel like they can actively contribute to the success of the business.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that every employee will be a trained sales professional directly tasked with sourcing leads, developing prospects, and bringing business into the company. Not at all. What I am suggesting is that you establish a “growth culture” within your company where all employees feel empowered to play a role in helping to drive revenues, improve profitability and retain clients.
All of your employees can influence the growth, and success, of your company:
The receptionist who answers the phone and greets the visitors that come into the office (if you still have one that is!).
The person (likely your receptionist) responding to your general company email address and answering queries coming through your messenger apps and other virtual channels.
The accounts receivable employee who speaks with clients about collection matters.
The technicians who are in the field attending to service issues.
The software engineer who blogs about tech innovation to the wider development community or unearths a nugget of data that leads to closing sales more quickly.
Any employee talking to other people about where they work and what your company does.
So what is a ‘growth culture’?
Rather than focussing purely on financial performance management linked to reward and recognition programs, a high growth culture values the ability to develop, learn, and grow through curiosity and experimentation. Employees feel able to take risks, leading to breakthrough innovations and business growth.
Business growth is a sustainable outcome of a successful growth culture. Focusing on growth rather than performance which is fear-based, is also a healthier and more sustainable way to go, because it's built by the people who drive.
According to HBR there are 4 key components of a growth culture:
An environment that feels safe, where leaders take responsibility for their shortcomings.
Dedicated focus on continuous learning through inquiry, curiosity and transparency.
Time-limited manageable experiments with new behaviors.
Continuous feedback across the organization through shared commitment to helping each other grow and get better.
How can I establish a growth culture to fuel business growth?
This will depend a bit on where you are at in your journey…
Your current environment
If you already have an open and inclusive environment, where all employees feel comfortable voicing their opinions, you're ready to start experimenting. Be mindful that a few loud voices are not taking more than their share of air time or drowning out the views of others. A growth culture needs to include everyone.
If there is still work to be done to build the right environment, start by creating some open forums where people can share their ideas. Holding a regular town hall with smaller breakout sessions around key topics, is a great way to do this. Adopt an approach such as Edward de Bono's 'six thinking hats' to ensure all ideas are given the appropriate space to develop. In hybrid working situations, make sure you have inclusive digital tools that to support this approach.
Start experimenting
This is where things get really exciting. You may have specific business issues you've been itching to solve, or growth areas you want to explore, but just haven't had the time or resources to address. Keeping it open could surface up ideas that take your business in directions you had not even dreamed of.
Under the assumption that your people are already clear on who your customer is, what your company values are and where you are trying to get to as a business, formalise an approach and some guidelines for testing new ideas. If employees would benefit from more clarity or need to understand the latest changes to your business strategy, first use the forums mentioned above to get everyone on the same page and aligned with your business goals (you may also find your business strategy actually improves with their input).
When deciding on your approach, I recommend you look at the the method developed and used by Brian Balfour (former VP of Growth at HubSpot) and his team. It is a comprehensive, yet lightweight scientific framework, for designing, executing and measuring growth experiments. The framework was designed for HubSpot, so it's perfect for a tech product, online business or crafting the right content and social media outputs, however, it can be easily adapted to any kind of business. Brian goes into it in detail in this video. The high level process is:
Brainstorm - backlog of experiment ideas
Prioritise
Design tests for those
Implement
Analyse
Take successful ones and systemise them
Anyone can run an experiment, but to be able to compare and evaluate which ideas you want to systemise in your business going forward, you will need a consistent, scalable and repeatable process. A centralised view of the tracking and reporting of your experiments will also ensure you are not doubling up on efforts.
Share the learnings and the stories
Remember that terrific open and inclusive environment you built? Play the wins, the learnings and the outcomes back into your growth culture and keep going.
Prioritising a growth culture creates an opportunity for all employees to come to the table with new ideas - without fear of ridicule or retribution, knowing that curiosity and experimentation (under the right conditions) is valued and encouraged and this in turn, drives innovation and performance. And to top it off, employees who feel valued and purpose driven are more likely to be engaged and therefore stay with your company.
Get growing.
Need help building a growth culture?
Running a mentoring program in your company will allow you to create a safe space to start building those inclusive learning behaviours. WERKIN can help you design a program, or support your existing program with our technology platform.
Ready to create and sustain momentum for growth?
Sign your team up for a free trial of WERKIN’s Growth Bootcamp Series. It’s a punchy 14 day challenge that will focus your team on growing your business and reap huge rewards. The first 30 days are absolutely free.