 Welcome to The Journey! Today we're going to talk about how to empower your employees to be more productive. Did you know, did you know 75% of people don't quit their jobs, they quit their bosses? What? What does that tell you? That is true. Right? We, we never ever quit a job because we don't like the company, everything else. It's usually that one person, that boss that just gets under your skin, you can't deal with them so you bounce. Well, we've got a lot of tips for you on how to really empower your employees and make them happy essentially. Empower them. You already jumping the tips? Yeah. All right. So first thing I want to share just my own personal experience with my boss that I love and will keep me around is he constantly provides support and motivation and in a way that is also intertwined with some constructive criticism because we always need to be growing. Absolutely. And I think he leads by example as well most of the time. So for that case it helps me to be on the right track and it empowers me to stick around and do the best work that I possibly can. Yeah, that supportive leadership is absolutely crucial for you as a business owner and that means talking with your employees, finding out there why, why do they come into work every day? What do they care about? And you can go and have like regular schedule one-on-ones. I know in the corporate setting it's a little bit more common. Maybe in the retail or service industry it's not, but you can really wow your employees by just taking the time even in 10, 20 minutes, figuring out what they're doing, help them grow, give that constructive criticism. Absolutely. And then encourage them to think forward past the current position that they're in. That's been another huge thing that I do as a manager myself and then also the conversations I have with my bosses. Okay, this is what you're doing now. Where do you see yourself in five months or in a year? Right. And that's again any setting, any business, any company, even if it you're a small, small company, help them figure out what that next step is. And for one of my employees that next step was to leave the company and do something else that really inspired him, right? And that's okay. As a leader, you're not going to always keep them there. I still have conversations where he calls me and say, hey, I'm doing this with my team. Can you tell me a little about what you did? And it really builds them up and inspires them because they're all people, right? All right, Nealey. So I think this ties in really nicely with the next point we want to share, which is to empower individual employees. What comes to mind when I bring that up? Well, with this, it's all about the individual person and letting them shine, right? Letting them hold leadership positions with different projects. They may not be a boss, right? But they can take leadership roles, help them be autonomous with their work day and their workflow or their desk. Let them be them because then you'll really get their best work out of them. Yeah, that's one thing I noticed as I'm a manager, as I mentioned, and having really taking the individual and honing it on that with individual employee and letting him decide when, hey, you want to do a half day just to like start your weekend early? Totally go for it. Come here for it. You want to do your spin class at lunch? Yeah, let me know how it goes. Like really listen to them, their schedule, their needs, their wants and treat them as an individual that they are and express themselves. All right, so another way you can empower your employees is to really create that positive work environment. And I talked about it a little bit before with those one-on-one, but it's really opening up and treating everyone like family. I like to tell them my guides and my peers that we end up spending most of our time together, even more so than our family. Let's treat each other like family. Let's make this a place that we like to come to, right? More than a co-host. More than a co-host. Like family. Corporate. Awkward. And yeah, nearly one thing I know I like to do as a manager is keep this sort of open door policy and make it a safe place where you can share things and you won't get made fun of or shunned just really keeping that a neutral environment welcoming. Tell me what's up, right? And if people make mistakes, it's okay, right? Failure is feedback and we're not going to ever grow if we don't get out there and test things and get out of our comfort zone. So encourage your employees to fail and that's okay because they'll learn from it and they'll get better and then your results will get better. Your company will grow because of it. Empowering. Empower them. One of my favorites to empowering employees, a healthy work environment. I know I love the GoDaddy office here in Kirkland because of the natural lighting that's by the water and they have a ton of windows. It's so beautiful. I'm super jealous. All we have is just desert everywhere on the outside to look at. But also it's great to just take a break and walk outside. You can walk. It's gorgeous here to walk along the water, but maybe that's not where you're located, right? Just make a conscious effort to change up the scenery, unplug for a little bit and also eat a well-balanced meal and not at your desk. When I see my employees do that, I'm like, no, no, no. Get out of there. You have to reset and separate the two. So if you see someone eating at their desk, have them take a break, go outside, have a picnic, enjoy some natural light. A lot of the one-on-ones that I do with my guides when I was a supervisor is we just had walking one-on-ones. We got to talk about each other and figure each other out, help each other grow, but we would just take a walk versus being in a stuffy room. Next one, all about joining forces, encourage teamwork and collaboration. I know what we always say, teamwork. Makes the dream work. That's right. Super corny. And so with that, you know, think about how you can leverage your teammates, projects you can do together. So I had a sales team when I was a supervisor and what I used to do to kind of just build a little bit of competitiveness, I would split the team up in two. All right, this team versus this team. And we used to play a game called dodgeball. So how it worked is every time one team made a sale, they got to knock someone else out on the board and last team standing wins. Yeah, I loved that when I was a sales rep back in the day, that we had different teams with team names. We had flags. Like we really embraced this, the team that can moderate. And then we would do these competitions, kind of what you're talking about, which just you already love what you do and you're motivated in certain ways, but it just had a little different flair to your motivation that day to beat that other team or maybe win a really cool spiff. And you bond with some of these other teammates that maybe you don't normally talk to or go to lunch to, etc. And it just helped everyone to take collaboration to the next level. All right, so another way you can empower your employees is to reward their successes, right? We're so quick to point out criticism and say, this is how you can do better, suck less, do better, do all these things, right? But when they do a good job, you need to tell them. And when I gave my kudos, I wouldn't just say a good job or hey, that was nice or whatever else. I would say, hey, that was a great job. And then give this specific example of what they did. That way they know, cool, I'll keep doing that because that's that's right on the money. I know you have a story of your rewards and successes. Yeah, I was thinking back to when I worked with Main Street Hub, which was before GoDaddy acquired us and all the sales are up. And one of the things that we really embodied and pushed was our core values. And we had five of them. And every year, they would give out this cool trophy. It was really pretty. It was like glass for each of the core values. And it would be company wide. And so one person or maybe two would get, hey, you demonstrated this core value of maybe like taking ownership. And it was just a really cool way to keep the core values top of mind, but also reward an employee. And it felt awesome. I got it a couple years, different core values, and it made me feel very maybe feel heard, it made me feel seen, and it made me feel empowered. That's so awesome. And with these rewards, it doesn't always have to be a monetary award. Like, yes, I would love you to throw money at me all day. But just that that thank you or a great job with that specific statement, or just just doing a call out to that person goes a tremendous way. Another one of my favorites to empower your employees, eliminate the negatives, negativity, it's kills, it kills a pollutes the environment and your team. So one thing I would say and we kind of mentioned this earlier with like keeping an open door is let your employees know they've been heard. Let them know you're going to do whatever you can to neutralize whatever this negative thing that is happening or the feedback that they're giving you. Because it's a brave move on their part too. I mean, they're speaking up and that's definitely one of our core values to speak up if something is going on that you're not cool with. And then in hopes of that it'll be heard. So let your employees know you're going to neutralize that. Yeah, and negativity comes in all shapes and forms. Like if you have an employee that is constantly complaining, that negativity will spread on to the next employee, the next employee. And then the whole whole office or wherever you work just becomes this negative experience. So if that's the case, isolate the issue, right? Bring that person in and figure out what is their actual concern? Because they're complaining but do they have a valid complaint? Are they frustrated about something else and things are just snowballing down, right? Figuring out what that is and making sure that that one issue doesn't spread to everywhere else. Because then one of your employees will run into a similar issue and then that negativity gets brought up again and it's over and over and over and that's not something that you want. Isolate those quick and early and just have a conversation with that person. Behind closed doors are just one-on-one so that way you really figure out what their concerns are. All right and last way to empower your employees, update your technology. Make sure it's very easy for them to see the success that they're doing, how successful they are, where they need to be in their day, how to achieve their goals. Right and having outdated technology just holds them back from being as productive as possible. I know that we at GoDaddy did something pretty, what seemed pretty small at the time but it was a huge success. We updated our guides monitors. They were like just these normal-sized monitors and we ended up giving them these giant monitors so they can see more and do more and that increased productivity. Makes a big difference. It made them happier and it was something simple like that. But think about if you're running some super outdated software that always crashes, has bugs, it's slow, it's clunky, that employee has to deal with that all day and if it's frustrating them, they're not gonna get any work done. I know I wouldn't be. Yeah rather than empower them, it's just gonna defeat them. But that's all we have for you. Go ahead and like this video and leave a comment on your favorite way to empower your employees. Or maybe it's something that you're doing that we didn't talk about. Also be sure to ring that bell so you'll be the first to know about our upcoming videos and future content. Awesome this is The Journey. We'll see you next time.