Welcome to Part 4 of 5 of our series Scaling Your Company's Divi Web Design where we explore proven tactics and practical strategies to help you Grow your Divi-based website design business.
Once you have taken the step to find talent, hire and build your team, it is now important to focus on how to actively develop, maintain and maintain these relationships in order to evolve effectively . And to echo what I've mentioned in the first part of this series, these ideas are not drawn from a dated text book or an irrelevant corporate environment, they are tactics, strategies and ideas from the real world. ] I interviewed doing research and preparing this series.
Let's go!
Contents
Effectively Increase and Manage Your Divi Web Design Team
The areas we will focus on in this post are how to effectively develop and manage your team. The reason they are separated into 2 different categories is because the two are very different and will require unique methods to improve each one. Since we have to start with a team before we can manage it, let's start with growth.
1) Grow Your Web Divi Design Team
When it comes to effectively developing a website design team, a common theme for all interviews in this series was empowerment. For someone to come into a website design role and be effective, they must be empowered. You can do it in a few practical ways.
Teaching / Training – That's why it's so important to have your systems and processes in place, as mentioned in the post 2. If you want to avoid yourself, do not worry about it. having to have the same conversations with a new team members over and over and over again, make sure you have so many materials, resources and methods put on your website, in tutorial videos or documentation to help you in training.
In doing research for this series, it became very clear to me how I failed in this field in the past years. My outsourcing experiences were largely good and successful, but there were many that did not go well. Although I could easily blame others, there were many things I could have done better to ensure a more positive experience while delegating work. More specifically, teach and train better. I can not wait for someone who is new to web design and Divi to work as fast as me. And unless they have the tutorials and resources at their disposal, it will be a very slow process of growing tests and errors.
As Tim Strifler says in interview # 1 "You must put your new employees in place to succeed."
Practically, creating internal pages on your site for new employees is an excellent approach if you have certain ways of doing things. For example, if you simply tell someone to create a site for you, you'd better be fine with their style, their coding, and their methods. You can not expect that they do it your way if you do not guide them.
Google documents, internal website pages, videos, e-mail templates and checklists of your project manager are also convenient ways to organize your material and your training process for new employees.
I also strongly recommend including the vision, mission, core values and other components of your business that show "who and what is your brand" in the initial hiring process. By doing this, a new employee will not only understand what your business is under the surface, but is likely to be in that state of mind every time they work for your business. This should not be a 100-page manual, it could be a practical guide that will guide them through this information, which would be a good start!
And you can have different manuals for different roles. For example, you might have a basic guide for your company vision, mission, etc., and then separate guides for web design processes, SEO processes, customer communication processes, and so on.
Mentoring – With teaching and training, comes the opportunity to be a mentor. Are they the same? Maybe in some ways. But when I talk about mentoring, I'm talking about more than being a boss, a project manager or a delegate. I'm talking about being someone who intentionally empowers those who are under him or her.
Practically, mentoring can include more one at a time together and a sincere and sincere effort to discover how your new recruits are doing, where they are and an opening to hear their victories and struggles . Mentoring can be more in-depth in your experience with your company, as opposed to the processes, systems and training materials you have entrusted to them.
The thought that I would like to convey to you when it comes to mentorship is what I said to myself recently: "Be what you needed a few years ago."
Empowering – When it comes to web design, outsourcing work as needed or hiring part time is risky. These collaborators are much more likely to bail out or disappear if the value of the opportunity is not there for them. It's understandable. But when you start empowering your team members, it can be beneficial for both parties.
In several of my interviews, the idea that we could hire someone to work, and then give him the means to start his own independent business on the site has been mentioned time and time again. . This shows trust between two people in a working relationship and we all know that there are slow periods, so if a subcontractor is counting on you to provide a stable job, this may lead to having to find work elsewhere. However, if you have them framed and empowered to be able to create more work for themselves, they may have other streams of income instead of having to leave for another opportunity because they have to pay the bills.
2) Manage Your Web Design Team
When your team members are prepared, trained, mentored and empowered, the real pleasure begins. And for fun, I mean the tedious daily tasks of managing and working with people 🙂
Centralization of Communication – As mentioned in the 2nd post, the centralization of communication between the members of your team will be the key. As your team grows, pinching, pinging and hitting many sources will wear you down. Most project management platforms will provide excellent options for centralizing communication between teams, but they also typically involve communication with the client. It is best to have a place for yourself and your team members to be able to converse under one roof "business" if you want it. And the most popular option for this is to use Slack .
Slack, if you are new to the game, is an amazing platform set up by the channels that allows you to centralize communication, post files, documents and tasks for the main purpose of. eliminate additional emails. There are a lot of methods to do this like using closed FB groups or messengers and I would post other tools but honestly, I do not think there's a lot of need to look at behind the style 
Project Management – Once you have centralized your team communication, it's time to start adding clients to the mix. This is essential when it comes to managing your team because if your business has to meet deadlines, maintain project continuity and organize systems, a project management tool is the best solution.
As mentioned in post 2, Basecamp and Asana are a couple of options that I and the other interviewees use. Although there is a slight difference between project managers and task managers like Trello for checklists and processes, most of these programs are a mix of 2.
There was a common thought among all the interviews I did while preparing this series, it was (as an owner) not to micromanage. That's why empowerment and teaching are so important before reaching this point, but the message was clear, assign tasks, delegate work, securely delay and get the path. Again, the teams that see the most unity and satisfied workers are those who offer room to grow and have some share in the game.
Open Communication – Verifying with the members of your team how they feel, how they are doing, they are happy and satisfied with the way things are going are also among the easiest areas to overlook as a leader. But it's important to make these things a part of your regular routine. Even if you have to program it or put it in your calendar, make sure you remember what you felt when you already worked a job where the boss was MIA and showed no concern for what you felt. I guess the moral of the story here is to put yourself in their place and remember how would you be treated if you were in their position.
Andrew Tuzson in interview # 3 points out that his door is always open to members of their team. Transparency, honesty and a keen ear have helped her business to hurt herself in the past two years and will definitely help you.
Closing Thoughts
Well, I hope this post helped articulate some good guidelines to follow for the growth and management of your team! Again, I have the impression that so much information and insistence on hiring and building a team when the real job is to keep them .
Do you have any ideas or experience to share on growing or managing a web design team? Please share in the comments below!
Part 5 – Organization of the "client side" of your Web Divi Design Activity
Join us for Part 5, the last part of our series Scaling Your Divi Web Design Company as we dive into the "client side" of your business for consolidate the things you need to do to evolve effectively. Until there!
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Post Growing Effectively and Managing Your Divi Web Design Team first appeared on Elegant Themes Blog .
