Your employees are going to be the best brand ambassadors that your business will ever come across.

Every single day, the people who work for you will be asked where they work and what they do for a living. They’ll name drop your company over a glass or two of wine and they’ll be asked about what it is like to work for you.

When it comes to this conversation, it can go one of two ways.

Either your staff will be happy to gush about your business, how well they’re treated and deep-dive into the camaraderie in the office – no office politics, here! – oooorrrr, they will tell the world about how much they hate their job.

They’ll go into details about how unappreciated they feel and how overworked they are. They may even go on about their dictator of a manager who never let’s them go home early and micro-manages all their time.

The question you should ask yourself is how well do you treat your staff?

Employees will review their position and employer in the same way they’ll pop online to TripAdvisor to review their latest holiday destination. So, it’s in your best interest as an employer to ensure that you are doing what you can to have happy staff. You want them to be able to be the type of employee that can gush about your business and how you run it. You want them to be able to recommend you to their friends when you have a job opening going.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that you’re going to be the type of employer who hands out salaries like sweeties and gives everyone a Friday off every week. However, it does mean that you can be the type of employer who looks after their staff management with getsling.com so that everyone is on the same page with the office schedule – no confusion.

It also means that you can be the type of employer who recognizes that their staff are individuals and have lives outside the office.

People who work for you are a resource, and they are going to be more than just cogs to your wheel. They may need the job, but you need them more than you realize and the better you treat them, the longer they will want to stay and work for you.

If you are a person who has worked in offices and various industries before finding success with your business, you may well have come across the type of management personality types that most people hate.

You know the ones; they like to TELL people what to do rather than have a discussion. They want a silent office with people working and they clock breaks and lunch time to the second and they do everything they can to bug you for being late.

These are the types of businesses that end up either closing earlier than planned, or they have such a high turnover of staff and a bad reputation. You do not want your company to be one that has a bad reputation and with the dawn of the digital age, people will talk and spread your name on social media.

The last thing that your up and coming company wants is to be known as difficult to work for.

It’s for this reason that you should be ensuring that you cultivate a working environment that people want to be a part of. We’ve got some stunning ways that you can treat your employees better than the competition:

They Want To Learn From You

No, really. Your employees are working for you so that they can learn from you. They have their own personal goals and ambitions and they’re there in the hopes that your company can teach them everything that they need to know before moving onto the next step. You may well be on top of your game as a leader and ahead of them in terms of the fact you own the company, but they may one day be better than you are, because they’re just at the start.

As much as your staff will learn from you, you will also learn from them. The employees are going to be the ones that tell you when you’re wrong. They’re going to give you their opinions about the way certain things are run and you’re going to have to listen. Don’t get offended though; they’re the ones working in the trenches, so what they see isn’t going to be what you see. Take the critiques and grow from them; you’ll thank me later.

Teach Them To Expand

When you have people excited to work for your business, you can teach them how to one day be their own boss and manage their own company. They will learn from you and you can give them a view of what it’s like to be in charge.

It’s not always sunshine and roses, as well you know, and being open about the trials and tribulations of running a business is going to make you more human to your staff. You can inspire, and you can teach them to expand their knowledge and their goals, simply by being real with them.

Attitude, Not Aptitude

Interviews are massively important when you are bringing staff on board, as you well know, and the interview is going to tell you far more than the qualifications of the person that wants to join your company. It’s going to tell you whether the person even wants to be there.

You could have a stunning resume show up in your inbox in reply to a job advertisement, but if the person who shows up is arrogant or has an attitude problem, qualifications just won’t matter. Equally, you could dismiss a resume without enough experience and that person could have the best, can-do attitude that you have ever come across.

Telephone interviews with those prospective employees is the best way to ascertain whether they would be good for your company, regardless of their lack of experience.

Eliminate Gossip

Did you know that when you gossip about employees, they find out about it? Gossip is dangerous. It has the power to take down a business and it’s the very reason that professionalism in the workplace is so important.

Yes, be a friend and ear to your staff, but make sure that you don’t indulge in office gossip or playground politics. Gossiping about a member of staff that you don’t particularly like only makes you look bad, unprofessional and creates a negative work environment that everyone can feel.

You can’t control what staff do, but you can control your own actions. These are grown adults with ambition, not children.

Surprise Them!

One of the perks of being the owner of a business is that it’s really in your hands how you choose to treat your staff. Whether this is visa remote working, wearing casual clothes on a Friday or allowing two duvet days a month, you need to treat your staff.

Think about what YOU would want from a boss and go for that. If you would have wanted a boss who sat you down every month to ask your ideas and opinions and if you could make changes, wouldn’t you want to be that boss yourself?

You likely won’t be taking on every opinion and making every change but giving people that platform to have a voice will gain you utmost respect. Surprise your staff and bring in competitions and prizes and games.

Make work more fun. Employees who are having fun are far more likely to be productive, because they feel valued and motivated. Imagine them calling their mother every night. When she is asking them about their day at work, you’d hope they’d say how much fun they were having. How would your own mother react?

When it comes to your management style, imagine what you would want and implement that. You need to be the type of business owner who recognises that it’s a privilege to have people work for you.

Yes, they need the salary, but a job is never just about the salary for people. It’s about the atmosphere and the attitude of management and the perks involved. It’s about waking up in the morning and feeling happy about going to work, not hating the fact they have to go in.

It’s also about developing each member of staff according to the goals that they have. You can’t expect that every member of staff will want to work for you forever, but you can expect that they get exactly what they need from your company in the time that they work for you.

Their goals and ambitions count, even if it means that they do their job from home and only touch base a few times a month.  No matter how temporary, you need to treat your people like the resource that they are. You need them to work for you, and you shouldn’t forget that fact.