Should You Create Accountability Partners on Your Team?

Aspiring entrepreneurs, when left to their own devices, often fall short of their ambitions, perhaps because they squandered capital or impulsively took the business in a bad direction.

One study by The American Society of Training and Development discovered the power of commitment when it comes to entrepreneurs: People are 65 percent likely to attain an objective after committing to someone else. Their odds of success rise to 95 percent when business owners hold regular meetings with partners to report on progress.

This finding can be extrapolated and applied to your staff members. When your employees engage with each other and commit to shared goals, the result is an increased sense of personal accountability across the company.

The following approaches can help create more accountability on your team by increasing personal commitment and engagement.

Intra-company networking

Creating ways for employees to communicate allows them to learn from each other, share experiences and gain emotional support. Whether it’s through regular meetings or chat groups on the company intranet, networking opportunities allow people with similar personalities to connect and push each other toward achieving goals.

Any effort to increase networking among employees should acknowledge that employees are busy, and therefore needs to be flexible.

Mentorship program

Some employees are better off being held accountable on a more personal level. A mentorship program allows these employees to develop a personal connection with someone who is experienced and has achieved success within the company.

Connecting employees with the proper mentor can be the most challenging part of establishing an accountability partnership. A mentor might be a supervisor from another department, a more experience employee or even someone from human resources. All of these individuals are well-positioned for a mentorship role, and many would be happy to mentor a less-experienced employee.

Gameification

Gamification is an emerging human resources method that turns aspects of an employee’s job into a game. Often, gamification involves an app that tracks numbers and performance data, allowing employees to track their performance. These apps also allow managers set parameters for awards and corrective measures.

Gamification also allows employees and management to track performance over time. This can be an effective tool for showing how an employee has improved or otherwise changed their performance.

An increased sense of pride

Any attempt to boost accountability should be seen as a way to boost employees’ pride in their own work. According to a recent report from the Harvard Business Review, even top staff members must feel pride in their work to stick with an employer.

If a staff member does superb work, they should be praised on the specific parts of their performance that help others and bring value to the company. In addition to motivating performances down the road, this kind of feedback helps to instill a sense of pride.

At Career Concepts, we support our clients’ staffing strategies through custom talent acquisition solutions and service. Please contact us today to find out how we can help your organization reach its goals.