I put a large part of my time in my daily routine to engage with my employees as they work, to answer their queries, help them out with their work or to just talk things in general. I like to hire new recruits who are fresh out of college with little or no prior job experience instead of trained veterans, this gives me ample amount of room to mold them. One of the reasons I like to engage with my employees personally, is because I like to motivate them to self-improve, to think things in a way that otherwise they normally wouldn't and take their work as something beyond just a 9 to 6 job. so that ultimately, they can give better services to our clients. Some of the ways I like to motivate my employees are:
1) Solving problems through building scenarios that help to think beyond the norm:
A lot of the Virtual Assistant and Data Entry work that we do involves making reports and submitting results in client portals. Sometimes, they have to be done in a specific order by reading and understanding instructions that are complicated. Often, one of the employees may face a situation where they get confused as to how to proceed with a particular work and may ask me for the solution. Instead of directly giving them the answers, I try to make them come up with the answers from the knowledge and experience they have so far through logical reasoning and deductive thinking.
I tell them to construct the scenario with the problem an ask them in such scenarios what could be the best possible situations.
When in some cases I do provide the answer myself, I give a thorough explanation step by step as to how I came up with the answer. More often than not, my employees will tell me with a smile that they did not think things in such a way and will do so from now on.
2) Making them write: One of the habits that I make my employees fall into is to send daily reports at the end of their shifts where they give a summary of the work they completed. Another thing I ask them to do is whenever they have work related queries and problems, to present them in detailed writing.
I believe this has some major benefits. One, sending a report at the end of the day that accounts for the work they have completed gives them a chance to self reflect, when they sit to write an account, they can think what they have done within the last 8 hours, whether the amount of work they have completed can be justified in an 8 hour working shift.
It also has a great benefit of slowly increasing their typing speed: as I mentioned previously most of our recruits are people who have landed on their first job right after completing their undergrad, on an average most of them will have a typing speed of 20/25 WPM which can be termed as slow at best in a professional environment.
However, these same recruits will find themselves to have their typing speed increased to 40-55 wpm within a span of two years working in ASL. This directly increases their efficiency and even helps them to have better chance to landing a job elsewhere if they decide to switch for better opportunity.
3) Engaging in discussions: When I sit with my employees, I do not just always talk about work, I
also like to talk about many other topics. The topic of the discussion can be anything from the prospect of the BPO industry, to career goals, or something entirely different, like new scientific inventions and discoveries to personal interest and hobbies to giving advise on personal life issues. My believe is that such engagements are necessary to make your employees work more efficiently and helps them to self-improve. When employees see a CEO with whom they can talk freely, someone who is friendly to them and is not just a boss. They will be more than likely to think their work to be more than just a job, and will strive to do better.
Being the CEO of a startup BPO firm is a tough job. Most of our work revolve around providing Virtual Assistant and Data Entry services. Part of the responsibility that I have to shoulder is to work with people, who will set their goals for the long term and aim to grow with the company, and this will only happen the company can motivate them to do better.
Zayed Ahmed, Founder and CEO of ASL Preservation Solutions