As the owner and founder of your roofing company, you are in a position of great power. Your team looks to you for professional guidance, career development, support in their day-to-day, and most important, inspiration.
By working to inspire your team, you can create an environment where your employees feel empowered, supported, excited, and successful. Inspiring leaders help build loyalty, retention, and job satisfaction among their subordinates.
If you struggle to inspire your team, you are certainly not alone. The pressure can be overwhelming at times, which is why roofing leaders often come to the Roofing Academy looking for support in this area. If this is you, our team is here for you. We are excited to share a list of the creative ways we use to inspire our employees every day. Keep reading below to learn more!
How to Inspire Your Employees Every Day
- Lead With Transparency
One of the most important things you can do to inspire your team is to lead with transparency. Open and honest communication from you as a leader to your office staff and field team members is vital to creating a healthy work environment. Leading with transparency, allowing your employees to ask questions, and to challenge you when appropriate all goes a long way to inspire them.
- Encourage Creative Thinking
Having processes and procedures is important, especially in the roofing industry when so much of what we do can lead to someone hurting themselves if they aren’t following procedure. But, as important as processes are, creative thinking is also crucial to your employees happiness and growth. Encourage your employees to come to you with ideas for how things can be improved or done better, both in the office and on job sites. Respect their ideas by considering them and if one really isn’t a good idea, explain why, don’t just give them a hard no.
- Prioritize Work-Life Balance
Work-life balance is a tricky subject for small business owners, but to be successful it is something you need to prioritize for both yourself and your team members. Give your team fair time-off, sick leave, and respect when they do take time off, by leaving them alone. Never make someone feel guilty for using time-off or sick leave, this will just lead to burnout. You also need to be a leader who sets a good example and actually takes the occasional vacation day yourself. If you don’t, your team might get the impression that it is not OK to ask for time off.
- Walk- the-Walk
Don’t expect something of your team that you aren’t willing to do yourself. If you expect your sales team to pick up the phone and make phone calls every day, show them that you’re happy to pick up the phone and make a few with them. If you expect your team to work through a torrential downpour to get a job done, you should be out there with them. Few things are less inspiring than a leader demanding something from you that they wouldn’t do themselves. Show your team that you walk-the-walk and that you are all in it together.
- Pay Attention
Keep your eyes and ears open when you’re in the office or out on a job site with your team. Pay attention to not only their words, but also their tone, their eye contact, and the things they say when they don’t think their boss is listening. By paying attention and reading between the lines, you might be able to identify when your team is feeling tired, burnt out, or unappreciated before it spirals into a huge company problem.
- Congratulate All of the Wins
As leaders, we often get hung up on the really big wins. We focus on the sales representative that signs a chain of stores in your region with you as the exclusive roofing contractor for all buildings. We recognize the field team member who goes above and beyond, working in the pouring rain or exhausting heat to get a job done ahead of schedule. While these people are important to recognize, we also must congratulate all of our team members on every win. Every win, every success is crucial to the forward momentum of your company and it must be treated as such to inspire your team.
- Trust Your Employees
No one likes a micromanager looking over their shoulder, correcting their work when nothing was wrong, or holding their hand through everything. You should be able to trust every single person you bring onto your team, if they do something to break that trust, that is a problem that needs exploring, but micromanaging someone’s work or calendar is never the answer. Trust your team to do their jobs, encourage them to tackle things on their own, and be prepared to advise them when they come to you.
- Create Career Path Progressions
Nothing will cause most employees to head for the door than feeling like they are working a dead-end job with no room for growth or career progression. Take the time to sit down with each and every one of the people below you, ask them what their career goals are, assess what steps they need to take to get there, and determine how you can help support them.
- Say Thank You
One of the number one reasons people leave their employer is because they feel underappreciated and this is especially true in a backbreaking, labor intensive industry like the roofing industry. Thank your employees not just when they go above and beyond, but when they simply complete a task or do what is expected of them. Saying thank you will encourage your employees to work harder in the long run and is a simple thing for you to do.
- Start With Why
Not only is this the name of one of our favorite books, but it is also one of the most important pieces of advice we have for any roofing leader. The most important thing you can do to inspire your team is to start with your personal why. Why did you start your roofing company? Why do you do what you do? Why do you believe your roofing company is the best? Why did you choose your current employees? If you remember your why and focus on always leading with your why, your why will come across in all of your interactions and inspire those around you.
If you don’t know your why, take time to seriously ask yourself the above questions and get to know yourself and your mission. Doing so will make you a stronger, more inspiring leader, employer, and contractor of choice.
Creating a company culture that inspires good work, employee retention, and respect, starts from with inspiring leadership and there is no one size fits all solution. If you are the owner of a roofing company or a team leader at a roofing company, it is up to you to inspire the people below you to succeed.
The Roofing Academy and our clients would love to hear from inspiring roofing leaders on how they do it! Sound off with your advice in the comments below!