As a small business CEO, you want to succeed in your industry. But your success depends in part on the people who work for you.

Creating a company culture that people love to work for takes some effort. You’ll need to see beyond numbers and industry standards. You’ll need to look at the people who work for you as individuals with unique backgrounds, skills, and needs.

By seeing your workers as people and giving each person an opportunity to learn and grow, you can begin to build a great workplace.

1. Focus on the People

It’s easy to get focused on outcomes, processes, and the work. But at the end of the day, people do the work. People work the processes, and it’s people that you pay. Great workplaces recognize that people are people and offer amazing benefits to them. Some days workers will give 110% and others, they can only give 80%.

Most great workplaces know that good workers are hard to come by. By focusing on the people and meeting their needs at work you can create a culture that sees them as more than a robot to be used.

Being people-focused means that you’ll create benefits and opportunities that help these individuals learn and use their strengths for your business.

2. Provide Learning Opportunities

Everyone working for your company should have equal access to resources and learning opportunities. This type of benefit should not be reserved for just the elite in executive roles. People who do data entry may want to learn as well. By offering learning opportunities to everyone in every role, you create a fair workplace that not only values the contributions people make now, but ones they can make in the future.

Whether you provide the option for people to attend seminars, take college courses, or learn other roles, these learning opportunities are some of the most important ingredients to building a great workplace.

3. Train People Adequately for Their Jobs

You won’t believe how many people don’t get much training to do their jobs. Employee training and development is not something you want to skimp on. Sending your staff to a two-day seminar and then expecting them to be able to do the job 100% accurately after that is unrealistic. It is your job as the small business CEO to ensure that you have people in place who can train others to do the work.

If you are the trainer, then use as many tools as possible to help bring new employees up to speed so that you can spend your time doing critical business tasks. A great workplace is one where people are allowed to ask questions and get the training they need to serve your business the best.

4. Promote From Within

There is nothing more frustrating than doing a job and taking on more responsibility within that job only to see the big promotion you worked hard for given to someone outside of the company. It is critical that you create a business culture that promotes from within.

Forget education levels for a second. Just because someone doesn’t have a master’s degree in graphic design doesn’t mean they can’t lead a team well. Just because someone’s degree is in biology and not business management, doesn’t mean they can’t be trained to oversee business operations.

Look at the work people do for your company and how willing they are to learn more. Look beyond what it says on paper and look at the results of what they can do.

5. Reward Everyone for Big Wins

Think about this for a second. The people at the bottom of your company put in a lot of work. In fact, the success of the people at the top depends on how well these low-level jobs get done.

Everyone from the janitor to the CEO deserves an opportunity to be rewarded when the company makes big wins. While the executive might be the one to land the business deal, they had support from lower management and their teams to gather everything necessary to make the sale. It was really a win for everyone.

The best workplaces reward everyone when there are big wins. While yes, some roles offer commission and other big perks, don’t keep your hourly employees out of the extra earnings. Bonuses go a long way to reward the entire company when it’s doing well.