10 Ways to Encourage Project Ownership and Deep Investment In Your Company
When your top technical talent feels truly invested in your company’s mission, they’ll take project ownership, be more inclined to stay for the long term, and share ideas that will help your company achieve its loftiest goals. You can effectively encourage this level of investment and ownership in these 10 ways.
1. Communicate the Big Picture: From your company’s vision and goals to the general direction you see the team heading in the next few years, open and clear communication about the big picture stuff is essential if you want your technical team to be more committed to your company. After all, if they know what they’re working towards, they’ll work harder to help the company achieve those lofty, big picture goals.
2. Communicate the Current Reality: Just as open, clear, regular communication about the big picture inspires a deeper investment, the same works for communicating the current reality. If your employees feel out of the loop on day-to-day processes or changes, they’ll have a harder time taking project ownership and investing more of themselves in the company.
3. Emphasize Autonomy: Naturally, project ownership and deep investment follow employers who emphasize autonomy. If you have micromanagers, an excessive amounts of hoops to jump through, or other processes that limit your technical employees’ autonomy you will counteract top talent’s natural desire to invest all of their intellect and ability in your company. And, sooner rather than later, they’ll be looking to jump ship for a company who they feel trusts them more.
4. Ask About Their Goals: The best technical employees put their all into helping your company achieve their goals. But, if you want them to deeply invest in your organization, you should pay them the same courtesy in return. Ask your employees about their goals and help direct them to ways they can achieve them while working at your organization.
5. Provide Feedback in Real Time: For real project ownership to work, you need to give prompt, constructive feedback to your employees in real time. This avoids a lot of wasted time and effort on both sides of the equation and helps steer your top technical talent in the right direction without being too hands on and discouraging deep investment.
6. Don’t Confuse Investment with a Lack of Work-Life Balance: One of the biggest misconceptions many employers have is seeing the employee who arrives on time and leaves on time on average as less invested than the employee who always arrives early, stays late, works on weekends, and never takes time off. A lack of work-life balance doesn’t equate deeper investment because a lot of employees are able to do the same amount of excellent work without putting in excessive hours on a regular basis. You can encourage deep investment and work-life balance at the same time and you should if you want to lengthen employee tenure and improve the health of your company culture.
7. Provide Training and Learning Opportunities: When an employee can learn more at your company through training opportunities or when you offer learning incentives like tuition reimbursement, conference reimbursement, and mentorship programs you’ll be rewarded with knowledgeable, long-term technical employees who are deeply invested in your company.
8. Celebrate Company Wins Together: Don’t let company wins or employee achievements go unnoticed! When you celebrate company wins and team achievements together, you inspire deeper investment in the company because it feels more like a community than a company. That “all for one and one for all” mentality inspires people to invest more of their talents, skills, and time into helping the company continue to win and achieve great things in the future.
9. Flatten the Hierarchical Structure: Open communication and autonomy are hard to find in companies with a strict hierarchical structure. It’s best to minimize traditional organizational charts and allow your employees to feel more equal. If they can interact directly with leaders and role models for better communication, recognition, and mentoring they’ll invest more deeply into their position at your company.
10. Consider Stock Options or Profit Sharing Bonuses: One of the best ways to encourage project ownership and inspire deep investment from your technical employees is to offer perks that literally give them a little more skin in the game like stock options or profit sharing bonuses.
Lengthening employee tenure and reducing the amount of time and money you spend on the hiring process is important and a great benefit of following these 10 steps. But, ultimately, you should use these 10 ways to encourage project ownership and deep investment in your company because it creates a more harmonious, productive, welcoming company culture that the best and brightest will flock to.