Finding qualified employees is one of the top challenges small businesses face. As of 2025, 34 percent of small business owners reported having job openings they could not fill. While enhancing your staff management strategy won’t fill those roles, it can help you retain more employees, use existing staff more efficiently, and upskill them to take on more.
Traditional, top-down management styles can be inefficient, leading to high turnover and low morale. These costly issues mean you’ll have to start from scratch with recruiting and hiring. Instead, adopt innovative, people-centric management strategies that boost engagement and cultivate a more agile workforce, whether you run a pet-care business or an IT consulting firm.
This post walks through innovative staff management tactics to help you build a more skilled, efficient, and resilient team.
1. Gamify training and daily tasks.
Gamification is the process of introducing game-like elements into non-game contexts. This strategy makes tasks and training more engaging and encourages long-term professional development.
Here are some ways to implement gamification:
- Set up a points system. Incentivize employees’ efforts to learn, upskill, better meet customers’ needs, and more by rewarding them through a points system. Allow them to earn points for achievements or completing tasks. Offer prizes (e.g., a gift card or company-sponsored luncheon) when they reach a certain points threshold.
- Offer badges or awards. Give employees a low-stakes way to track and pursue their professional achievements by offering awards at key milestones. For instance, offer a badge when a team member receives their first five positive customer reviews.
- Implement a “streak” system. Help employees build and track consistency by setting up a streak system for daily or weekly tasks. Have employees track when they complete these tasks, and offer rewards depending on how long they can keep up the streak.
- Create friendly competitions. Set a common objective and challenge staff to reach it first. For instance, you might set an upselling goal for your sales team and offer a prize to the employee or team that hits the target first.
Gamification naturally motivates employees to complete onboarding or upskilling sessions, consistently complete repetitive tasks, or steadily chip away at long-term projects.
2. Focus on cross-training.
Cross-training involves teaching employees the skills associated with different roles within your organization. For example, say you run a dog daycare business. You might train employees who typically manage the kennel on how to book appointments so they can also man the front desk if needed.
To get started with this strategy, follow these basic steps:
- Identify key roles and transferable skills. Pinpoint potential bottlenecks in your operations or areas where only a small group of people know how to perform a key task. Then, identify which of those skills are most transferable to other team members. For instance, perhaps only one person knows how to build important reports, but another team member with data analysis skills could easily learn to do so.
- Develop a training plan. Sketch out a formal training plan for each skill, breaking it down into manageable tasks. Define clear objectives in the plan, like “Upon completion, the employee will be able to build our monthly analytics report.” Then, determine how they will learn, whether through one-on-one sessions, online modules, or shadowing.
- Select participants. Choose participants who are already primed to learn the skill. An outgoing sales representative, for instance, would be well-suited to a client-facing role in another department. These employees should also be motivated and willing to learn new skills.
- Begin training. Kick off the training process and have the trainer provide regular, constructive feedback along the way. Monitor progress against the actual plan and make adjustments based on the learner’s needs and feedback. Ask the employee to apply and practice skills along the way to ensure they are actually absorbing the information.
Finally, give employees the chance to perform the tasks after they complete the training. This might involve scheduling job rotations, having them fill in for employees who are sick or on vacation, or pitching in during busy seasons. Offer these opportunities regularly so employees can solidify their learning, maintain proficiency, and strengthen their skills.
3. Encourage peer-to-peer recognition.
As eCardWidget’s guide explains, peer-to-peer employee recognition occurs when employees thank and recognize each other for their hard work, building team rapport and cultivating a healthy workplace. The guide also offers some helpful tips for encouraging peer-to-peer recognition, including:
- Making recognition convenient so employees can recognize one another quickly and easily (e.g., offer eCards that employees can complete and send in minutes).
- Using a system that defines what actions are worthy of recognition (e.g., aligning with specific company values) and what it means to be recognized.
- Prioritizing authenticity by allowing employees to participate when they want to, rather than making it a requirement.
- Encouraging employees to be specific about why they are recognizing their peers.
Additionally, gather feedback from employees along the way to fit the program to their unique needs and your company’s culture. For instance, you might identify areas of confusion and provide more detailed instructions to close the gap.
4. Reduce administrative burden with tech.
The right technology can automate repetitive tasks, freeing up more time for your team to focus on meaningful or creative work. To avoid getting overwhelmed by the sheer number of AI or automation tools on the market, start by identifying the most time-consuming administrative tasks and then seek out tools to streamline them.
Let your employees drive this process by seeking their feedback first. Share surveys or have one-on-one conversations to understand which tasks and workflows you should prioritize. For example, if employees spend hours managing scheduling communications, Gingr recommends seeking a solution that automates appointment reminders and follow-up messages.
Workflow automation can reduce strain on your staff, streamline or eliminate tasks they don’t enjoy, and give them more time to work on upskilling or professional development projects. In turn, employees will be more productive and engaging, helping reduce turnover.
5. Practice open-book management.
Open-book management is a practice that involves sharing key financial and performance data with your employees. It fosters transparency and ownership, empowering employees to put their best foot forward.
While it can be scary to share this much information about your business, rest assured that you don’t have to reveal every minute detail to your staff. However, keeping them in the loop on the following information helps employees see how their daily tasks contribute to overall success:
- Customer satisfaction scores
- Net promoter score (NPS)
- Monthly revenue
- Progress toward sales goals
- Client retention rates
- Staff allocation data (e.g., whether staff hit the right balance of billable and unbillable hours)
- Website traffic
- Social media engagement
- New leads generated
Revealing this big-picture information can also instill leadership qualities in individual contributors. For instance, an employee might notice a subtle downward trend in website traffic, conduct research to diagnose the problem, and recommend helpful next steps to their manager. This strengthens their skills as a strategic leader, helping them understand what questions to ask and when to take action.
Investing in a positive employee experience with these innovative tactics is the most effective way to build an efficient, engaged team. In addition to cultivating a sense of community, these strategies help your team members develop their skills and leadership mindset, setting you up for success as your company grows. After all, recruiting leaders from within will save time and money while demonstrating to other employees where their hard work can take them.
