Investing in Your Employees Is Like Investing in Real Estate

Creating the best team for your business is a challenging and rewarding process. Just like investing in a piece of property, it requires that you perform your due diligence, appraise your investment, and renovate to make sure the investment is in ideal shape.

As the founder of a successful real estate company, I offer the following tips for investing in your employees:

1. Get to Know Them

Getting to know your team is just like performing due diligence before investing in a property. You would never invest without learning the ins and outs of the property.

Take the time to get to know the people you are looking to hire. A resume is a good start, but personality is important, too. Go beyond what is on paper. Employees are the heart and soul of a business. You want everyone to get along and for each employee to feel welcomed by and involved within the company.

Each and every person you bring onto your team serves a purpose. They each have certain strengths, too. When you show interest in your employees and invest time in getting to know them, it will pay off in the long run. When your employees feel special, they will care more about the company and their jobs.

2. Show Compassion

Showing compassion by taking care of a piece of real estate will help to ensure that you won't need to make major renovations when the time comes to sell. The same principle can be applied to your employees: When you show compassion to them, you ensure that they will perform at their peak for a long time.

Show employees you care about them beyond how they impact your balance sheet. If someone seems down, find out why. If someone needs a shoulder, give it to them. Investments aren't always financial. Knowing someone cares can go a lot further than a bigger paycheck. Employees will also be more loyal when they see that you are here for them in good times and in bad.

3. Celebrate the Small Stuff

Celebrating the little things can be compared to highlighting your investment property's best features during an open house. If you have enough charm in your property, it will attract the right buyer.

Celebrate happy occasions with lunches, happy hours, and other events that show your team the company is not just the founder's personal piggy bank. If the company grows, it should make sure its employees enjoy the success alongside the leadership.

At Sharestates, we celebrate each birthday with lunch, a birthday cake, balloons, and cards. We also try to have a happy hour or game night every Friday. These investments help to build a feeling of community among team members.

4. Invest in Their Development

Investing in your already successful employees is like renovating a home that already has value: It can only increase the value even more!

Your employees are bound to have shortcomings. It's like finding the right life partner: Nobody is perfect, but if you get 50 percent of what you want, you're ahead of the game. It is your job as a leader to invest in training to make your employees into powerhouses.

As part of our annual reviews, we ask our employees to evaluate not only their work performance, but also aspects of their overall lives. For example, what skills/hobbies do they want to learn outside of work? How confident do they feel? What are their suggestions? What skills do they plan to learn this year for their role? Each of these questions is designed to uncover more information about our employees' strengths and weaknesses. Once we identify a weakness, we work to see how we can remedy it.

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Considering the important role your employees play not only in the success of your company, but also in the quality of your life, it makes sense to invest in them. Taking an already high-performing employee and investing in the proper training to get them to the next level could be what separates you from your industry peers. You may not always see a return on each investment, but risk tolerance is what separates smart investors from stagnant observers.

Allen Shayanfekr, Esq., is the CEO and founder of Sharestates.