Building a Company For the People
When it comes to building a company, there are a lot of moving parts and pieces.
Aside from the obvious first steps – developing a business plan, building a brand, securing funding and gathering your work force, there are other things that are just as important when starting off.
Developing your company vision statement. Your goals and aspirations. Envisioning what the future holds – not just for yourself, but for your employees and your brand.
What you expect the effects of the workplace environment to hold and what kind of moral you envision creating.
We all want to create safe and positive workspaces. A place where ourselves and our team are happy to come into.
A motivating and happy space.
A space for the people.
Such a place can seem like a unicorn these days.
A mythical and wondrous place that is often hard to come by.
And while this may be true, striving to achieve this place should still be a common goal that all workplaces embrace.
One of the common things that can easily occur however, especially with small to medium sized businesses, is that in an effort to build a company ‘for the people’, these places end up being a company BY the people.
Something that sounds so close, but is so far off of the original intended goal.
While a company by the people can have its time and place, in the growing stages of business, clear expectations and goals need to be laid out.
While building a company that has its expectations laid out by the employees sounds great – for the employees. This business model serves no true benefit when it comes to maximizing business potential and future growth.
While you want to get your staff happy and motivated, clear expectations and rules need to be laid out to ensure you’re always moving in a forward momentum.
Picture this – you build a company and start hiring your team. Your intent is to have a crew with open and flexible availability in order to maximize their potential through your work flow.
By having an open roster, you are able to shift and make adjustments and accommodate the need for any potential vacation or time off requests.
You can set up some consistency while still allowing adequate breaks for your team.
Expectations are laid out, and met. Any last minute changes to scheduling or employment and you have a team that is easily shifted and accommodated.
Everyone – including the company – continue moving in a forward momentum.
Having everyone on the same page, while still allowing them to be flexible to changing demands of the market allows you to maintain a company that is FOR the people.
Alternatively, you can hire based on the availability of those that walk through your door.
Scattered – potentially sparse. With restrictions, and maybe some without.
The idea of having a work week crew and a weekend crew potentially comes to fruition.
However if we’ve learned anything in the past year, life can throw curve balls and things can change on a dime.
Where you may have once found your work heavily based in one area of the week, things can shift and you find yourself scrambling.
Working with a team with restrictions who dictate to you when and where they can work – while has its advantages depending on the person, can really slow things down when it comes to actual operations.
Having a company thats built BY the people often only gets you so far.
In the event of change, development or the future growth, when you’re dealing with the constant restrictions of your team, you can really hamper your growth and your bottom line.
While having a company by the people sounds enticing and sounds like you are creating a positive work environment. When you look at the potential for the slow down of growth or the affects having set expectations for one employee and a different set may have for another – you’re operationally affecting not just your future, but also the teams morale.
If you find that you have staff that don’t value or live up to the expectations that you sought out to achieve, perhaps it isn’t that you should be changing the ways of the company for them – but rather them that should be making adjustments or looking for alternative options.
Parting ways over a disagreement on expectations doesn’t have to be a negative experience, but rather something that all parties can benefit and learn from.
Employees learn what roles, responsibilities and ultimately jobs or careers that want to take part in, and employers learn what really matters for staff, what really matters for growth, and what really matters for the bottom line.
It can often be a fine line but when expectations are set, they should be met. And that is when the real growth happens.
Guest Blogger Rayna Davies
Rayna Davies is a graduate and practitioner of Business Management. She has developed an expertise in blogging, covering subjects like travel, world events and security. Having grown up with a father who has developed an expertise in Physical Security and Executive Protection in the RCMP and two major corporations, she has personally observed and experienced many security details. These experiences have included personally meeting HM Queen Elizabeth, Prime Minister Jean Chretien and many celebrities. She presently assists Sentinel Security in Executive Protection workshops and guest blogging and also assists Gloprosec Preventative Services in Intelligence gathering and Business Administration. Her passions include World travel, having visited every continent.
