Keeping your employees productive requires more than encouraging speeches. You need to value them as people. Moreover, you need to value them as individuals. As an entrepreneur, you care about your company. It means something to you. That might not necessarily be the case for your members of staff. They might be members of your team, but that doesn’t mean they feel like your team.

In other words, you have to be invested in your workers if you want them to be invested in your business. Treat them as well as you treat your customers if you want them to stick around. So, these are the steps to creating a motivated and efficient workforce.

Encourage Your Workers to Communicate and Collaborate

If you want your workforce to be as efficient and productive as possible, you also need to encourage your workers to communicate and collaborate. That doesn’t mean employees should always work together; certain tasks or projects might be completed more productively on a solo basis. However, maintaining communication and a strong connection with their colleagues will ensure that every staff member works efficiently. Your team members will understand how they fit into your business at large because everybody will know their roles on a particular project. Miscommunication often slows down productivity.

You might even want to give your team members company phones and laptops which are connected to the same server. The BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) approach to business is less popular than simply offering employees company devices. This is a good thing because it makes it easier for your business to calculate tax reimbursement (you don’t have to waste time figuring out how employees use their personal devices at work), you can ensure every company device is protected against malware and other security threats to the overall network for your business, and it’ll be easier to monitor work-related activity on devices. So, if you want to efficiently manage communication and collaboration between your workers, you should offer company devices that make it easier for them to share information with one another and complete their projects. It’ll save you time and money.

Make the Right Hiring Decisions

Another step to creating a motivated and efficient workforce is to make the right hiring decisions. This is such an important part of developing your team into a group of professionals who know what they’re doing and care about the company. Obviously, finding people with the right qualifications and levels of expertise will help to ensure that you have skilled and productive employees on your workforce, but you need to assess their personalities, too. You’ll find plenty of smart people out there who are apathetic or simply have a negative attitude. Those people could have a negative effect on the rest of your team members, so it’s important to hire professionals with the right mindset.

That’s why the interviewing aspect of the hiring process is so vital. It’s an opportunity to assess a candidate based on more than just their credentials. You’re looking for friendly, conscientious, and enthusiastic members of staff. Additionally, you want to make sure that candidates with the right qualifications are well-suited to the “real world”. In other words, you need to make sure you hire people who can handle real-life problems as well as they handle problems in exam papers. You should do a case interview which tests a candidate’s problem-solving abilities based on a potential business-related problem that you present to them.