Employee Investment

From the Experts

Story by Dr. Manal Fakhoury

Building an Ownership Culture

Staff members that have a personal stake in an organization and the future of it will treat every decision as if they were the owner.

This is a statement that every business owner wants. In reality, no one will ever care about their company as much as they will. Does this have to be true? Founders are not the only people who can feel a strong sense of ownership in a company. In fact, building a culture of ownership amongst teams can drive business success.

When employees have a personal stake in the company, and its future, they are more invest-ed in the performance of it and are more likely to feel empowered at work.

Building this type of culture is not easy but it is not always easy but it is worth it.

Here are two ideas of how to make this happen:

1. Clearly define the company’s mission, vision and values.

What is the purpose of your organization? Who are you serving? What are your immediate and long-term goals? Every employee should be able to answer those questions. They should also understand how they fit into the bigger picture. This helps them do their part in contributing to the higher purpose.

Mission, vision, and values are not something you touch on once but something that is contin-ually reinforced. This gives meaning to every task they are working on being that it is a step-ping stone to the vision of the whole company, not just their job.

2. Ownership mentality

Have your team tell the managers what is working and not working versus the management going through a checklist of tasks to see if employees are doing what they are supposed to. This gives every member a sense of proactive responsibility instead of reactive management. No one likes to be micromanaged but everyone loves to be given room to be real and authen-tic and to implement their ideas (as long as they fit into the mission, vision, and values of the company).

In our next article, we’ll continue this topic and talk about building a foundation of trust and allowing freedom to your team.

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