Seasonality: The Secret to Team Engagement

JJ Littrell, Co-Founder and COO of Tuatara

Spring has sprung!

Unless we are the lucky few who live where the weather never varies from perfection, spring is, literally, warmly welcomed. We emerge from cold, grey, short days with the promise of warm breezes and the sun setting after dinner instead of before. Trees and bushes start to flaunt their colors and fragrances – anyone else a big fan of the smell of fresh cut grass?

It’s true that nature shows off in the spring and we’re never really surprised by it. Maybe it’s a little later or earlier than we expected (even Punxsutawney Phil is only right 39% of the time!). Perhaps it’s a little warmer or cooler than last year, but we know it’s coming as it always does.

There is something comforting about the seasonality of life – we know when to expect certain weather, holidays, family obligations, sports, buying cycles, and even schedules that are busier or busiest. Even though our lives are constantly in motion, knowing when to expect each season allows us to plan accordingly.

Let’s face it, if we had to choose between the changing seasons or a perpetual Groundhog Day, human nature has us reaching for the variety that comes with each season’s change.

So – if seasons appeal to our human nature, and your business, just like life, is in perpetual motion–what would happen if you intentionally brought seasonality into your team engagement process? You’d get a more engaged team and likely impressive results to boot!

SEASONS IN YOUR BUSINESS

Look at seasonality in your business – conference season, vacation season, or busy season. Whether you’re in start-up mode, growth, mature, or exiting, have you ever considered whether your team feels the seasons the same way?

Owners usually have different seasons than our teams. Typically, longer-range cycles drive business owners: quarterly tax payments and annual financial goals, three-year strategic plans, growth or succession opportunities, learning additional practical skills, or crafting a new offering that can be added to your menu of services or expertise over time.

Your team members, on the other hand, typically experience completely different seasons. Perhaps they have daily production goals, a bi-weekly paycheck, or monthly performance metrics as their focus.

There are some popular systems that attempt to connect the daily rhythms of the team with the annual or longer term goals of the owner. While a system like this can support getting everyone to use the same language and be more aware of these different seasons, that is really just the beginning.

Let’s walk through how you can use seasonality in your business to build productive and engaged teams.

CADENCE, ALIGNMENT, AND TRANSPARENCY

Now that we can all appreciate the value of seasons, not just in our lives, but in our businesses, let’s walk through how we can use that to support our team engagement initiatives. Our company loves alliteration, metaphors, and generally, any other tool to make learning and remembering complex topics easier to approach. When we realized the formula for success with using seasonality to create team engagement formed the acrostic CAT, we were pleased to go with it! So let’s learn about using CAT in your business:

1. CADENCE

Just like seasons allow us to know what’s expected and be comfortable with what’s coming, creating cadence in your business does the same. Use cycles that already exist, like summer slowdowns or tax filing deadlines. Communicate the recurring and predictable cadences to your team, your service providers, and even your customers. This allows everyone to know what and when to expect things from you and your team.

One of our favorite cadence changes that usually has a huge ROI – is resetting your performance management cycle to an annual versus anniversary date. If everyone knows performance evaluations and potential pay changes happen each April, the process is clear and uniform for the team. This also prevents constant requests for you to consider pay increases off cycle, when it’s more challenging to review the market, your business results, or employee performance. You can say, with confidence, that unless someone’s role has changed, you review all compensation adjustments in April. No more

sleepless nights wondering how you can answer these requests without driving that employee away!

2. ALIGNMENT

Knowing how you’ll be approaching key decision points and when–your team can begin to see how their performance contributes to the bigger picture. Creating alignment starts with communicating the cadence of the business, along with goals for each area and how each team member can impact the goal while being incentivized to do so. We’ll continue with the compensation cadence example from #1 above.

With an annual process already communicated to your team around how you determine compensation increases each April, here is how Alignment works beautifully:

• A key part of determining compensation increases is assessing the profitability of your business from the prior year.

• You defined the main “needle mover” to increase profitability by adding new customers through current customer referrals.

• To facilitate easy referrals, you ask current customers to think of one coworker they could recommend to your business before they leave your office.

• Your team is now happy to ask and track how many current customers they asked and how many times that resulted in a new customer. They understand how their compensation is aligned with this metric, which is aligned with the overall business goal.

3. TRANSPARENCY

Transparency can be the trickiest part of this process… but doing it well creates a team that is incredibly engaged, delivering excellent results, and being less susceptible to the “talent wars” we too often read about in the news.

It can be scary to think about being open with your team about where your business is succeeding and where there are areas for improvement. We often worry that telling the team where we really, truly are can be counterproductive, whether those results are good, bad, or neutral.

The reality is, that when you have created alignment and delivered information transparently, your team can drive your business towards your goals. Oftentimes, teams grossly under or overestimate realities, and in the absence of information, they will write their own story. By responsibly sharing information, you create trust and build a team that feels empowered and engaged in something bigger than themselves. This can lead to elevating not only your team, but your business and customer experience as well.

To finish our example from the C and the A, let’s play this out for the employee compensation process. The cadence allows your team to know when performance and compensation are considered, and through alignment, they now understand that they can improve their opportunities for additional compensation by creating results through the customer referral process.

Let’s add transparency to the mix:

• Before individual performance evaluation meetings occur, have a meeting with your team to go over the compensation process.

• During that meeting, explain the research you’ve done on inflation, cost of living increases in your area, and market compensation for the roles they hold.

• Share the results from their efforts to increase customer referrals, and whether that impacted profitability as you expected it would when you set goals for the year.

• Explain how each of those factors influenced the compensation changes for the year, and that you’ll be discussing their individual performance and the next 12 months’ compensation in one-on-one meetings.

A SEASON OF CATS

We thought about trying to take it too far here as we wrapped up and talked in idioms about spring showers raining cats and dogs… go ahead, we groaned too! But, we hope that you can see how creating a team culture of cadence, alignment, and transparency empowers and engages your teams more wholly and consistently. As you think through your business, team, and seasons this year, we hope the CAT framework helps you create a business you and your team feel engaged with, and connected to year-round!

As the Co-Founder and COO of Tuatara, a Strategic Finance Agency, JJ believes strongly that the finance function is a catalyst for business growth and sustained success. With a wide range of professional experience, JJ’s journey includes experience from Fortune 500 and Top 50 Accounting Firms to international startups, leading teams as large as 90 professionals.

Website: GrowWithTuatara.com

Email: jj@growwithtuatara.com

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