Knowing how to reward your employees, including a variety of performance inducing practices, is essential to developing an incentive program that works. Incenting team members will allow them to feel valued and further encourage them to support your operational objectives and expectations.

Do you survey your client families? Survey results provide invaluable opportunities to evolve and better what you do and how you do it. Accountability in ensuring your client families are satisfied beyond their expectations is critical to securing their recommendation of your firm to others.

Developing a strategic plan as it relates to how you interact with your client families is essential. Several touch-points have the ability to influence how a client family relates to your people and organization. Understanding which of those can influence your bottom-line results allows you to hone in and evolve them as key elements of your differentiation strategy.

Developing a company mission, vision and values allows employees to galvanize to how you expect your business to operate. It provides them with a framework from which to conduct themselves, while at the same time promotes your firms operation culture to the community you serve.

Appraisals and review are now used, almost universally, as the channel to provide feedback to individuals on how to develop their performance. Most often, feedback flows from the top down. While this type of performance management is essential, 360° and 180° appraisals expand the feedback to allow it to flow upward and from a range of sources. Business owners who employ this approach develop a greater perspective of their business operations.