Your employees are the most important asset of your company, and working towards building teams without conflict allows for a high retention rate, better talent acquisition, and more engagement, all leading to improved sustainable profit. As a business owner, you need to help your employees and make them feel valued to become fully committed. In today’s podcast, Leila Ansart from Leadership Impact Strategies and Stephen Halasnik from Financing Solutions discuss how business owners can increase profitability and remove friction within their teams.
Summary
How to Increase Profitability and Remove Friction within Your Teams
There’s no doubt that conflict is bound to occur in every human gathering. And when there’s conflict in a workplace, it causes disaffection, frustration, sadness, pain, discomfort, and more, leading to high employee turnover, low productivity, and in a worst-case scenario, can put your business at risk of failure. However, savvy business leaders are adept in conflict management; they ensure that they reduce friction points to the barest minimum through the proper engagement of their teams for the effective operation of their companies.
The way you treat your employees and how your employees treat one another can negatively affect your business’s bottom line. With this in mind, every business owner should strive to create a workplace that makes employees engaged, motivated and loyal. Read on as we walk you through the essential ingredients for removing friction and increasing profitability with your team.
What Are Tips for Removing Frictions Within Your Teams?
In today’s workplace, if you’re not a good manager, you will have difficulty keeping loyal, motivated, and engaged employees. Employees want to work in a place where they feel valued and loved. And it’s your responsibility as a business owner to create a healthy environment that encourages your team to give their best for your business’s success.
Below are the tips for removing friction points and maximizing profitability in your business. 
Employee Engagement
Employee engagement can be defined as the involvement and enthusiasm of employees in their work and workplace. When your employees are fully connected to their work, they produce a better business outcome.
Employee engagement should be your primary responsibility as a business owner. You have to make a concerted effort to make your teams know what needs to be done. Plus, you should support them and let them know how their work connects to your business success.
To succeed in this, you must have an open communication channel where you interact with your teams and ask them for feedback, while simultaneously being wary of micromanaging your employees.
Team Building
Team building is a critical aspect of running a successful business that’s devoid of conflict. It entails improving the efficiency and performance of the varying workgroups in your company through various activities.
Team building activities are essential in removing friction in business as it helps employees to get more comfortable with each other and know the company’s acceptable mode of behavior. Plus, it helps team members know how problems and conflicts will be resolved.
Open Communication
An effective and efficient communication system is crucial for managing friction in a workplace. Open communication fosters collaboration and sharing of ideas. You should build a work environment where people should be able to express their feelings, issues, views, and thoughts.
Effective communication offers numerous benefits, including promoting motivation, helping in socialization, and serving as a source of information. In addition, through communication, you can inform and clarify the employees about the task to be carried out, how they should perform it, and how to improve if it falls short of expectations.
Further, communication helps you disseminate vital information to the team members, keeping them abreast of your company’s decisions. Plus, a well-informed individual has a better attitude to work.
Employee Training
Providing your employees with the requisite training can help remove friction and improve performance and throughput in your business. In addition, through training, your employees can improve their skills and become more effective in performing their tasks.
Employee training improves job satisfaction, and a happy employee will likely stick with your company for a long time. After all, research has shown that a well-designed and implemented training scheme can help promote employee retention within an organization, and employees who participate in corporate training and development feel good about their employers.
Have A Business Coach
Running a business can be tricky, especially when you’re just starting and have limited experience. Hence, it’s imperative you have a business coach or trusted advisers who can help you build your leadership skills so that you can manage your employees effectively.
A business coach can help you analyze your business in relation to its goals and helps keep you on track. Additionally, a coach will help guide you on how you will get the most out of your employees.
Create A Business Culture
You should develop accepted norms, values, and behavior within your company. And your behavior should be in alignment with the kind of behavior you want to create. Culture is a critical component in business and has a significant impact on your business operation, and it helps determine the direction of your company.
If you have a well-defined culture, you will hire people whose interest closely aligns with business core values and reduce the chance of conflicting interests as they are wont to show real commitment.
Set Expectations and Review Performance
State in clear terms what every team member is responsible for, as this will help promote accountability and clarity and, at the same time, remove friction. When employees are duly informed about their tasks, they become more committed to what they do.
On the other hand, you should put an evaluation process in place to periodically assess the performance of your employees based on your established KPIs (key performance indicators). Doing this will help you identify areas for improvement and reduce the chances of conflict occurring down the line.
Learn More About Our Guest
As a certified executive coach, Leila Ansart has 13+ years of experience advising business leaders on how to increase profitability and ease in their companies by removing friction in and between their employees. According to research, the direct manager accounts for 70% of the variance in an employee’s engagement and retention. Leila works directly with business owners to connect the dots on where the friction stems from and how to address it in an effective and affirming way. This results in her clients’ significant improvement in profitability, as well as a greater sense of ease in their role as business owners.
Learn About Financing Solutions
Financing Solutions provides an easy-to-setup unsecured small business line of credit to small businesses. The small business financing product is a great cash backup plan that costs nothing to set up, nothing until used, and is inexpensive when needed. Financing Solutions is rated A+ by the Better Business Bureau and 5 stars by the BBB/Google Reviews.
Unlike a traditional business bank loan, our business credit line requires no collateral or personal guarantee (except in fraud cases), making it an excellent alternative business financing option. Small businesses often use their line of credit for short-term expenses, working capital, to make payroll, or for business investment, especially when business cash flow is temporarily down.
Get a free, no-obligation business line of credit quote by filling out our simple 2- minute business line of credit application here.
Remember: The time to set up a credit line is when you don’t need it.