Treat your people well and the business will take care of itself

What's more important than your staff? The Curve Group CEO Lyndsey Simpson shepherded the business from a small start-up to an 80-employee company. Simpson believes looking after staff are the key to growth.

We spoke to her about building company culture, shaping benefits and the sexism small business owners experience.

Lyndsey Simpson is speaking at Accelerate 2019 alongside the England Rugby Women's team and other experts at Twickenham Stadium on 14 February. Book your ticket to make 2019 your year of high performance, acceleration and resilience.

1. What was the company like when you joined?

I joined in 2007. They had been trading for three years and had less than 10 employees. Coming from Barclays it was a very different environment!

They were also a pure search and selection company. The 2008 recession forced us to diversity - for the better - and we're now four businesses with different trading cycles.

2. How important has the company's vision been to its growth?

It's been massively important. Having a vision linked to a quest allows us to adapt as opposed to a hard set of objectives, which you either hit or fail against.

Business is a game of snakes and ladders. You take four steps forward and find the occasional ladder that takes things up a gear. But then, just as you least expect it, there's a snake that drops you thee steps back.

By striving against a quest we'll keep moving forward in a positive trajectory towards our ever-changing goals.

3. What's the most surprising challenge you've faced?

The lack of professional respect you garner versus being in a senior corporate role. The patronising comments made about our business in particular being owned by three women was unexpected and unfortunately too frequent.

In my experience, proving people wrong by delivering the growth and letting the numbers stand up for themselves was the best way to silence critics.

Changing the title co-owner or founder to CEO made a big difference in being understood and respected. Everyone understands CEO and it has credibility.

4. What changes did you make to Curve's hiring process as the business grew?

We hire based on a fit with the Curvy way. This embodies our four key values as an organisation. Pretty much everything else can be taught if someone fits that cultural alignment.

This meant we developed our own in-house training programmes to bring emerging talent and experienced hires in from different backgrounds.

5. What's the key to staff motivation? What do business leaders need to know about their staff?

Everyone is different. What works with one person will not work with the next. Spending time investing in figuring out the drivers of each individual in your organisation pays dividends.

You will always be surprised. What you think motivates employees, like better benefits, pension and healthcare, often have far less impact than more personal or social gestures such as paying for a team get together or giving a meal for two. The big benefits packages very quickly become hygiene factors and are ignored.

6. What elements are there to staff motivation?

To find out what is important to your people, you quite simply ask them! You may find this works well on an individual level. But also surveying them as an anonymous group is incredibly useful. Ask people how engaged they are with you as a company, your strategy, their role and the leaders they work for.

Understanding any capability gaps is key - without the tools to do the job, you will feel less motivated. That extra 10% of discretionary effort comes from their commitment and engagement with you as an employer and them caring about the end result. It's very difficult to release that discretionary effort without company values that resonate and a clear understanding of how they make a difference.

7. What small changes can business owners make to help transform people's working lives?

Crikey, where do I start?! This is not a short list. In reality, it's a thousand little things rather than a magic bullet. Genuinely wanting to transform lives and practising what you preach from the very top is the only way to prove you mean it.

If you don't have values or a team mission or it's been years since you revisited them get your people together and collectively come up with them. Very rarely do words and values set from a top-down perspective land and have the same impact than if they have been an equal part of the team brainstorming the best ways to encapsulate who you are and what you do as an organisation.

Lyndsey Simpson is speaking at Accelerate 2019 alongside the England Rugby Women's team and other experts at Twickenham Stadium on 14 February. Book your ticket to make 2019 your year of high performance, acceleration and resilience.