As a business owner, have you ever felt like you were juggling other roles and responsibilities while trying to keep your company afloat? That may look like:
- Working weekends
- Babysitting team members
- Constantly fixing mistakes
- Being the one person holding the business operations together
Yeah… Managing a small team like this isn’t normal. At least, it shouldn’t be. Luckily, you can take this weight off your shoulders by making small changes to your team’s work habits.
The best part? You can improve internal processes without:
❌ Firing your team
❌ Consulting a business coach
❌ Switching software
❌ Hiring a business integrator
❌ Quitting and returning to a “real job”
Let’s cut to the chase with 7 simple ways to tweak your team’s habits to work for you rather than against you!
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Tip #1: Ritualize Successful Behaviors (00:36)
One of the most effective ways to achieve a goal is by determining the habits required to accomplish it. First, identify vital steps in your process and instruct your team to repeat them over time. 🔁
If you need direction, ask yourself the following: What do I need to do and at what frequency to be successful in this area?
📧 Jolene, a subscriber from our Workin’ Process newsletter, asked: “How do I get team members to look at the process docs more than once?”
In this case, Jolene’s team would benefit from creating a routine of reviewing SOPs. She can assign someone a task to review SOPs that haven’t been updated over the last quarter every 30 days.
The result? This routine incentivizes the crew to check the SOPs regularly. If they don’t complete this action, the consequence may be catching up on this responsibility. 📝
While the task manager offers a helpful reminder, employees will eventually adopt better work habits related to this business goal, making it a recurring part of the workflow.
Tip #2: Improve Work Habits by Making History Public (03:04)
Admitting your mistakes can feel embarrassing. However, you can turn them into learning opportunities. Adults know the value of listening to other people’s experiences and how it can save them from unnecessary stress and headaches.
So, how can you apply this tip to your business? Create a centralized space where you and your team log your mistakes and solutions. 💡
A public record ensures your employees have a clear roadmap for proceeding with specific processes, like creating invoices and updating plugins for your website.
Before making this shift, we recommend starting with 1:1 conversations with your crew.
💬 You can say something along these lines: “Hi [First Name], I understand we had an issue with [describe the situation here]. Can you help me understand what happened to cause this problem? I’m not looking to blame. I want to understand what led to this so we can start moving forward.” 🗨️
Are you worried that your question will offend your employees? Lead by example!
Model the behavior you want to see and record your mistakes in the log. It’s all about being honest so you can help your team improve their work habits for the future.
Tip #3: Require Preventative Actions (05:58)
Beyond adding your mistakes to a public record, you can hold your team accountable through preventative actions.
Preventative action is a clear strategy for fixing an issue and moving forward without repeating the mistake in the future.
They don’t need to be extensive. In fact, a preventative action plan can be minor tweaks in a process for quality assurance.
For example, you send your audience a newsletter with a typo. Sure, it’s embarrassing, but you can easily avoid this by creating a newsletter checklist with a review task before scheduling future emails. Yay, problem solved! 🎉
🧠 Keep in mind: The person responsible for the area and mistake should develop the preventative action. Not the CEO or manager. We discuss ownership and delegation more in this post!
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Tip #4: Infuse Learning into Your Culture (08:21)
The best work habits come from having a student mentality. To achieve this, you’ll want to create a space to turn mistakes and preventative actions into celebrations. 🎊
In other words, acknowledge what’s happened (the issue) and what your team members did to remedy it (the preventative action). Then, celebrate the learning process during your check-in meetings.
Consider asking constructive questions in these conversations, like what did we learn from this situation or what can we do better next time?
📝 Quick note: Be careful with your tone here. The last thing you want to do is patronize your team for finding a solution. Instead, focus on the value of the lesson and let your crew take it from there.
When you create an environment where learning is acceptable and encouraged, you may inspire employees to develop templates to prevent workflow hiccups or review your SOPs more often.
How’s that for promoting great work habits? 😄
Tip #5: Prompt the Work Habits You Want to See (10:46)
While it’s important to have your employees take ownership of their mistakes and fix them, sometimes it’s necessary to step in.
📧 Our subscriber, Christian, asked: “How do I change an entrenched employee mindset where they’re used to not updating docs?”
You can start by prompting conversations about your desired actions. Layla shares the following example at timestamp (10:51): 🎬
“Hey [First Name]. You said you would update the emails, right?”
“Yep!”
“Great, can you tag me in the task?”
“Ummm…”
“If you haven’t created the mistake task yet, please do it. Then, tag me in it. Otherwise, I’ll follow up with you every other day with an email to figure out the status of things.”
This discussion is a simple yet firm way of reminding employees of your expectations and the cost of non-compliance. In this case, the staff member will likely follow the policy and avoid multiple check-in emails.
💡 Our CEO’s motto: Pressure without direction is stress. Pressure with direction is motivation.
Tip #6: Incentivize the Right Priorities (13:05)
Noticing the team isn’t working towards your long-term goals? This barrier may have something to do with what you’re incentivizing. 🤔
For example, our client wanted their employees to be more responsible. However, after digging deeper, we realized they measured their team’s success on task completion, a short-term objective.
So, what’s the problem with this situation?
This rule punishes employees with overdue tasks, inspiring them to take on fewer responsibilities so they can finish their assignments by the end of the day. That means they’re discouraged from taking on larger projects.
Instead, incentivize the creation of value! Provide key metrics that tie directly to value for your customers. 🎯
For example, you may focus on the number of resolved support tickets or completed tasks. Think of incentives that have a positive metric.
Not sure about your business incentives? Ask your employees about their top priorities for the week and why. Their answers will provide a lot of insight into their motivations.
📈 ProcessDriven resource: If you need help with incentives and which systems to focus on, take our 5-minute Systemization Snapshot™ audit today!
Tip #7: Don’t Borrow Emergencies (16:22)
Sometimes, things go haywire when a team member doesn’t prepare, read an SOP, or follow a policy. When this happens, you may feel the urge to jump in like a firefighter and take care of matters yourself.
👉 Our work habit tip? Don’t do this!
If you’re always fixing issues for your team, they will never learn their lesson. The next best option is to re-delegate the task to the responsible party.
Let’s say an employee drafts emails, and you review them before scheduling. You take one look over the copy and realize it’s missing a few items. This email isn’t ready to be reviewed.
Rather than writing the email again, reopen the email draft task and leave a comment:
✍ This isn’t complete. Please finish it according to the SOP and resubmit once it’s ready. By the way, this task is one day overdue, and the deadline is X.
Providing constructive feedback is another way to hold your team accountable and ensure you don’t burn out by covering for your employees.
Effective Work Habits to Implement for Your Team
As the CEO or manager, you can only do so much to resolve issues and prevent them from occurring in the future. It’s a joint effort that requires commitment from everyone on your team! 👐
While work habits don’t happen overnight, you can incorporate these tips into your daily workflow.
Want to improve your systems to support your work habits better? Take our complimentary 5-minute Systemization Snapshot™ audit to receive a diagnosis of your team’s productivity and bottlenecks in your operations.
Let’s kick our work habits into gear and enjoy the process!
ProcessDriven helps small teams turn chaos into process. The ProcessDriven Approach™ combines software expertise with practical process-first strategies that have helped 2,020+ teams build a scalable foundation of business systems.
