It’s not easy to compete for talent these days. With unemployment at 4% and many big companies recruiting aggressively, small business owners need to raise their game to a whole new level to hold onto their best employees.

Measuring employee satisfaction as your business grows can make a big difference, enabling you to continue building on what you’re doing well and to shore up any weak spots in your culture. Employees may be hesitant to tell you directly that they’re unhappy but might be willing to share that information anonymously through other measures, like a survey.

Here are some tips on how to measure employee satisfaction and improve it as you scale up.

Look at turnover.

One of the most powerful measures of employee satisfaction is whether team members stick around for more than a few months. Holding onto a high percentage of your team from year to year is often a good indicator of employee happiness.

What if you have high turnover? Losing people frequently doesn’t necessarily mean your team is unhappy. It depends on who you usually hire. If you’re hiring mid-career professionals and have high turnover, losing them quickly may be related to an issue in your workplace culture, since they generally don’t change jobs quickly.

But if you mainly hire recent college graduates, they may still be trying to figure out what career to pursue, and their departure may simply mean they opted for another industry. You’ll have to bake that into your hiring and retention plans.  

Still, some companies do better than others at attracting and keeping top talent, even if they’re in high-churn industries. If you suspect some of the team members who’ve left your business have been unhappy, think back to what might have caused that.

Did they have enough opportunities to put their talents to good use? Was their manager supportive? Was their pay adequate? Did they have enough work-life balance? Ask a trusted team member to give you honest feedback. If you listen carefully that what you’re hearing – and what the team member might not be saying, out of tact – you may find some areas you can improve upon.

Consider a formal survey.

Many companies that are scaling up gravitate to third-party measures of employee happiness such as the Employee Net Promoter Score, often called the eNPS. The Employee Net Promoter Score measures how likely an employee is to recommend a company to others as a place to work, on a scale of one to 10.

For smaller companies, programs such as TINYpulse Engage or Survey Monkey’s templated employee satisfaction surveys can be helpful. Just make sure you follow the rules on how to keep the survey anonymous. Employees in a very small company may wonder, understandably, if you will figure out who spoke up about any gripes. (The providers offer instructions on how to do this).

Some companies find that doing exit interviews when employees leave is helpful. Ask employees what motivate them to move on to another job or situation. If you’ve just lost five people from your accounting firm because the other firms in your city are paying more, you may need to adjust your compensation.

Put an improvement plan in action.

Knowing how employees feel about your workplace is a good starting point, but you also need to act on what you’ve learned. Create some key performance indicators (KPIs) for the areas where you would like to improve.

For instance, if employees are unhappy because of lack of work-life balance, your KPI might be the results on a TINYpulse survey every month about whether they actually did feel they had good work-life balance. If you find you’re not able to improve the situation, you might look at solutions such as bringing in a temp or contractor to help tackle the workload, so you don’t lose good people to overwork.

It all starts with knowing where you stand. Once you do, you’ll be in a strong position to start finding the solutions that will allow you to scale up successfully.

Entrepreneurs need to stay on their toes this year. Dramatic political headlines, fierce competition for talent, technological changes and a host of other factors mean all of us need to raise our game.

Here are five important traits and habits entrepreneurs need to succeed in 2019.

Awareness

Regardless of how you feel about the news media, the “low information diet” some entrepreneurs espouse will not get you very far in today’s environment. With developments such as the recent government shutdown affecting many businesses and their customers, all business owners need to know what’s going on outside the walls of their offices. Even seemingly distant developments, like the EU’s copyright regulations for digital publishers, can have a ripple effect in the U.S., so it’s important to stay on top of what’s happening.

If you’re not doing so already, set aside 10 minutes a day to keep up with current events in whatever way you prefer—reading newspapers online, watching the news on TV or listening to the radio. It’s one of the best investments you can make in keeping your business ahead of the curve.

Quick reflexes

Knowing about news developments will give you a head start, but to make the most of them, you’ll have to analyze them, figure out what they mean to your business and, in some cases, act on them right away.

This can be overwhelming when you’re dealing with the daily realities of running a business. Going to events in your industry where you will meet other leaders who are dealing with the same challenges may introduce you to new ways to keep up that you haven’t thought of yet. If you’re not part of a trade association, consider joining one. They can be a great source of information about issues specific to your industry.

A collaborative spirit

Many small businesses are not in a position to take on the giants in their industry single-handedly. If that’s the case for your firm, look for opportunities to cooperate with other small and midsize businesses so you can compete.

Let’s say you run a three-person marketing firm. You may not be able to go after work from a Fortune 500 company on your own if you’re competing against much bigger marketing agencies. However, you may be able to become a contractor for a bigger agency that has the clout to win that work. The arrangement will give you opportunities to work on high-quality projects, and the agency to find the talent it needs to complete them. It’s a win-win.

A commitment to networking

To find out about—or create—opportunities to collaborate with other entrepreneurs, you will need to network often, and not only when work has dried up. Make time in your calendar every week to meet other entrepreneurs in your field and adjacent industries. Find out what your contacts’ goals are and look for ways you can help them achieve their targets through introductions, referrals and the like. The more you support your professional connections, the more likely they will be to help you.

A command of social media

It’s never been easier for a small business to reach a huge audience. You don’t have to master every kind of social media to make the most of this reach. It’s a matter of figuring out where your target customers hang out—whether that’s YouTube or LinkedIn— and building a presence there.

This may evolve over time. Let’s say you run a yoga studio. If you’re still blogging on your company website about how to get in shape and boost your mental game, why not try branching out onto Instagram, where many health and lifestyle entrepreneurs are making a mark? You’ll know soon enough if your target customers spend time there if they start responding to you.

Make sure that when you or your team use social media that you truly become a resource and a thought leader. In addition to sharing information on your product or service, let people know about relevant community events, products that complement your own.

Most entrepreneurs have too many things to do and not enough time to do them. Focus on the activities that truly have an impact, and you’ll be surprised at how much you can grow your business this year.

Customer service is all about humanity. Face-to-face, voice-to-voice, text-to-text – the best customer service agents listen to their customers’ concerns, take them to heart and try and solve their problems. The industry is, fundamentally, rooted in compassion, personality and communication.

So it’s only logical that your customer service team should study their craft by watching TED Talks – lectures that don’t feel like lectures, delivered by amiable professionals with illustrative PowerPoints.

1. Steven van Belleghem: “What if customers become friends?”

This one’s a no-brainer. Emphasizing customer loyalty and industry data, speaker Steven van Belleghem scrutinizes the dropping levels of customer loyalty and investigates the reasons they have for growing brand-agnostic.  

The problem with conventional loyalty programs, he argues, is that they aren’t really about loyalty. “This is a discount card,” he says, waving around a typical buy-10-get-one-free card. “I use it, not because I’m loyal to this company, but because it gives me a discount.”

He believes that customers can genuinely befriend companies. “What if your best friend becomes your client?” he posits. “I think the answer is very simple: we would try harder.” It would put our reputations at stake personally, because we’d think of customer service as more than just a job – we’d think of it as a personal commitment, something we enjoy and value.  

This mentality improves customer relations, obviously. And in doing so, it also keeps customers truly loyal.

2. David Bequette: “The Customer Revolution in Customer Service”

In this TEDx Yerevan talk, David Bequette discusses the problems of customer service in the developing world. It’s a fascinating look at the history of 20th-century customer service. He provides a quick overview of the rise of the service industry through Fordism in the United States, which placed value on products and, by extension, the agents who helped customers understand them.

By contrast, in a country like Armenia, a history of racial segregation and discriminatory taxation caused minorities to flock toward industries based more on education and less on material goods, such as doctors and lawyers, away from the service industry.

“Basically, what we have now is the same mentality,” he argues. “The mentality that the service industry is below us. That it’s better to get an education.”  

That mentality, however, doesn’t correlate with a better financial future, let alone an equal society. And it especially doesn’t make for a pleasant customer experience. Bequette’s TED Talk is insightful and surprising, while remaining positive and open toward change in the future.

3. Tom Costello: “Creating Guest ‘Evangelists’ through Customer Service

This one feels more like an old-school corporate pep talk (including a cryptically vague pyramid of “integrity” packed with corporate buzzwords), but the lecture is nonetheless one of the most popular customer service talks on TED and for good reason. It contains valuable, age-old insight into how, crucially, a corporation of any size can insert its values into customer service. Subsequently, that drives customers to become evangelists for your brand. (It’s reminiscent of our long-held stance that marketing and customer service teams should be aligned, as one group feeds into the other.)

Costello is an undeniably energized (and energizing) speaker, right down to his grand Seussian finale. It’s impossible to watch his gleeful optimism and not smile.

“Just think about coming up to Mendocino,” he breathlessly yells to a roaring audience. “You’re driving up that 128, and you’re going in this windy road, you got a couple of kids, maybe you have to stop off at the side of the road ‘cause they’re throwing up and everything else, and so you come up, and you’re bedraggled, and you’re frustrated – but then you see this wonderful smile. And maybe a warm fire, a beautiful fire, and a freshly prepared plate of food. Well, that frown turns into a smile. Now that’s service.”

4. Celeste Headlee: “10 Ways To Have A Better Conversation”

Not literally about customer service, Celeste Headlee’s topical sociological lecture deals with the myriad problems of modern verbal communication. She opens on the historically unprecedented polarization of the Americans landscape, and how personalized technology has fuelled that division.

She argues that we are slipping by ignoring interpersonal, face-to-face communication, especially with younger generations. She glosses through the typical tips (eye contact, repetition of their problems) before launching into her real tips as a professional radio interviewer.

She lays out 10 rules for a modern world: don’t multitask, don’t pontificate, ask open-ended questions and so on. These may sound like rules for journalistic interviewing (and they are), but a good customer service agent must also be a good listener. And much of interviewing is simply listening – just like in customer service.  

5. Vineet Nayer: “Employees First, Customers Second”

Vineet Nayer, author and CEO of a tech company, has a gripping, slow-burn lecture style that draws listeners in. His argument is simple: happier employees will create happier customers. If your employees actually enjoy going to work, you can build an office culture that cultivates pride, loyalty and camaraderie that will grow outward.

“Why does an employee on a Sunday spend his money, time, energy, drive to a mosque, a mandir and a church, and feel good about it? And why does the same employee get paid to come to our organizations on Monday, and feel bad about it?,” he asks. “Because organizations have a vision and a purpose for themselves, they don’t have a vision and purpose for that employee.”

Using his own company as a case study, he lays out the ways in which emphasizing employee happiness helped transform the work culture and grow the company to the point of its vast success today.   

Employee training can be difficult – you have to instill an ethos into someone without coming off like a brainwasher. But your customer service team members have to believe in your brand, and they have to understand the reasoning behind compassionate interactions.

And if they won’t take your word for it, TED Talks are a terrific tool to do just that.