Your business doesn’t have to operate as a cold, corporate machine; why not make the most of the people inside and outside your business who make it what it is by turning your company into more of a community? It can really pay off long-term for your business because it encourages greater employee engagement, making them more invested in what your business is aiming to achieve.
Your customers will also enjoy feeling more involved in what the business is doing. They’ll no longer be left on the sidelines; instead, they’ll have a connection to the business. How can you make all this happen though? There are lots of options, more than most business owners realise, and just some of them will be discussed right here.
Share Ideas More Openly
To begin with, you should try to share ideas more openly inside your business. Make it part of your remit to listen to what everyone is saying so that you can improve the experience offered by the business to everyone involved in it. This applies to customers and employees alike.
Create a Newsletter for Your Employees
Your employees need to be kept in the loop and informed regarding what’s happening inside the business and what directions it’s going in. You could do this by creating a newsletter that gets circulated among everyone who works for the company. It’s a great way to get everyone engaged and it’s not very hard to make happen either. You can learn about getting it started by reading the information over at https://www.readz.com/employee-newsletter-ultimate-guide. Your employees might really appreciate the idea.
Volunteer and Help Out with Community Ventures
Your community should stretch out into the real world communities in which your business is based. That way, you can make real-world connections with people and genuinely make their lives better. You could sponsor community projects, help out with local schemes or even set up your own projects and plans. Whatever you choose to do, it should all be geared towards making your business a part of what’s really happening on the ground.
Make Your Business More Democratic
People want to feel like they have a say in what happens inside the businesses they work for. That’s a pretty normal and understandable feeling for people to have, and if your business operates in an undemocratic way that generally ignores the thoughts and feels of customers, this is something that needs to change urgently. Everyone should have a say in what the business does and how it moves forward. This is good for the company as a whole too because good ideas can come from anywhere and anyone.
Pay People According to Outcomes
If you want your team to feel like they truly are an integral part of the business and how it functions, you should think about directly rewarding people for the work they do. After all, if the company is doing well as a result of the work people are putting in, it’s only fair that they get a share of that success. Profit sharing is becoming more and more popular, and it’s a great way of making your people feel invested in the business and truly part of it.
Build an Online Community of Customers
Businesses need to have a core group of customers that are going to keep coming back for more. Those are the loyal followers who are not going to abandon the company as soon as something else catches their eye. To make the most of these individuals, you need to foster an online community that your business is connected to solidly. It needs to be a two-way deal for it to work too. Head over to https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/274958 if you want to learn more about making it happen.
Switch Up the Office Layout
Your employees will find it hard to work collaboratively as a team if the way in which the office is laid out is not suited to that kind of work. It’s something that you should definitely pay some attention to if you want to get your business and its employees functioning more like a community. Make sure that there are open spaces with large tables and flexible seating options that put power in the hands of your company’s employees.
When your business functions more like a community, it has more of a chance of doing good work and generating positive outcomes for the business as a whole. It’s time you started embracing some of these ideas in your company.
