The Human Role in Your Business Success

Without exception, the most successful organizations thrive because the people involved in making it grow can create something great together. That sounds a bit cliché, I suppose, but the humanity behind a business shows its worth when the human side is recognized. People move successful organizations forward, and they do it better when the organization recognizes its people’s humanity.

Business success comes when the people in the business perform well. And management must help those employees perform to the best of their ability. So what are those human characteristics and needs for leaders to recognize?

A Need for Communication. Poor communication will always cause poor results. Clear communication is vital to people. We all want to understand goals and how we are going to reach them. Employees crave clear outlines of their roles and how they contribute to success. When a person sees how their role contributes to team success, they will work harder to perfect their roles’ responsibilities.

A Desire to Contribute. People naturally want to be additive and valuable. Leaders can foster this through small teams with specific tasks. Some of us did not relish small group projects in school, but the reason was that we wanted the result to be good. Most of us know our weaknesses, but we also know our strengths. If we are allowed to use those strengths, the results are better for the company organization.

A Longing to be Heard. No one wants to be ignored. People want to have their voices heard and acknowledged. In the workplace, hearing someone respectfully means listening and understanding. This could be as simple as fostering respectful communications in the office or providing tasks and schedules that meet an individual’s needs. A healthy organization has people willing to say what they think, knowing managers will listen with respect.

A Need to Grow. Humans are always looking for what is next and ways to grow. We are notorious for creating lists of resolutions that improve our lives and ourselves. The need to become better is true in business, too. We want challenging work, and good managers will encourage employees to reach beyond the status quo.

A Desire for Self-Assuredness. When employees are challenged and successful, they become confident in their abilities to contribute. Any person who has solved a seemingly insurmountable problem is stronger for the next challenge—not because they have experienced that challenge before, but because they are more self-assured and confident in their ability to figure it out.

Satisfying each of these human needs is not always easy. The way may seem unclear (and we desire clarity). The best way to contribute may elude us as managers (yet we, too, want to contribute). Still, our business’s success lies in the potential created when we help meet our employees’ human needs. Treating employees as people who want to grow and contribute will help catapult our organizations into successful ones—thanks to the humans who work there.

Author Profile Jon Forknell is the Vice President and General Manager of Atlas Business Solutions, Inc., a software marketing company specializing in employee scheduling software, including ScheduleBase employee scheduling software, and other business software solutions. In the past, Jon has been recognized by the U.S. Small Business Administration as a SBA Young Entrepreneur of the Year. For many years, Atlas Business Solutions has been named one of Software Magazine’s Top 500 Software Companies.