As a company grows and the number of employees rises, gridlock can quickly find its way into the business processes. Gridlock can disguise itself very well as such things as ‘company customs’ or ‘unrolling process’ and in severe cases even ‘internal processes’. Because most of the time, the reason projects don’t move forward quickly is that the people in charge of the issue isn’t being consulted.
As the Beekeeper topic of the month is Employee Engagement, we have listed three tricks to help you prevent and/or eliminate gridlock in your company.
Introduction Week
When you have a new employee starting, give him a week to get to know the company and his colleagues. Let him take ‘shifts’ in the different departments and see what is going on and who is doing what. This gives him a better sense of what the company is doing and of his role and worth in the corporate processes.
Regular Touch Ups
A common thing in start-ups: Have regular touch ups for all employees. Organise breakfasts or lunches with employees from different departments, designed for them to talk about business and what they have been doing and how they have been feeling about it.
If your company has many employees it can be better to just randomly assign two or three from each department to meet with the colleagues and to give each group a day to hold that ‘meeting’. That way you can keep things running in the departments and there is no danger of certain people and departments going under. Eventually all the colleagues will get to have had breakfast and lunch with the other colleagues and have an idea what they do. Hence also knowing who to contact about specific topics.
Introduce an Internal Communication Platform
Are you familiar with the terms: ‘work-wife’ and ‘work-husband’? These stand for the people you work with and with whom you choose to spend most time in and around the office with. It is basically your best friend at work. And how important it is to have one, can be seen in several studies, for example this report by the Gallup institute: Nearly all ot the employees with a best friend at work show better satisfaction levels and tend to perform better and to take less days off due to illness.
But it is not easy for employees to connect with each other at work. Especially if it is a big company. To get acquainted to all your colleagues and find out what you have in common during the short time you get to talk about anything else than business. This is why it is important to offer your employees an exchange platform. Some kind of adult playground where they can discuss other topics than the balance sheets they have been working on or the last deliveries that didn’t arrive in time.
Online solutions can help, as they can get to know each other outside of the working hours but still in a work environment. And guess what? Studies also show that co-workers spending time with each other outside the working place end up talking a lot about the job as well, so they don’t get off track and keep each other updated on what’s happening. And as an anonymous author on twitter once said: “Through online communication you can meet people who have more in common with you than the geographic components. These friendships are real”.
A great thing about this, is that you can also use this communication platform to improve the first two tricks and get a perfect employee engagement and a boost collaboration inside your company. This better collaboration on both the personal and the professional level help prevent gridlock.
If you want to build an environment for your employees to interact with each other and get a deeper insight on who they are working with and what they are working on, hit us up. We have great solutions and can look back at very successful stories.
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