Guaranteed Ways To Build A Team Of Engaged Employees

Julie Starr • January 28, 2022



Building a team of engaged employees should be something every business owner makes a priority. If your team is disengaged with the work and workplace, you can hardly expect maximum output and optimal results. Engaged employees are productive employees, and will often go above and beyond to get results. Let’s take a look at some guaranteed ways you can build your own team of engaged employees:

Commit To Your Employees 

First of all, you need to commit to your employees – get to know them as people . Of course, there’s a line you shouldn’t cross between boss and friend, but you should get to know them and take an interest in their lives. Remember their names and things about them so you can strike up a conversation with them in the future. Let them know that you do care about them, and don’t just see them as employees. 

Offer Training and Resources

Offering the right training and resources for your team means that they not only grow professionally but personally, too. An inability to move forward within a company is one of the main reasons employees choose to leave and work elsewhere. Make sure they can climb the ladder if they want to, and provide things like team-building activities to ensure they can all work with one another effectively. 

Make sure you also provide resources to make their lives easier, such as collaboration software, equipment, and so on.  Engaging employees on business sustainability and integrating personal sustainability plans will not only educate employees on sustainable business practices that help the business to flourish, but will also provide guidelines to living a sustainable lifestyle outside of the work environment.

Provide Them with Tools for Success

This means giving your employees the resources for problem-solving, access to additional training, and strategies for handling difficult situations. Your employees will feel much more valued and appreciated when they know they have the support to handle any situation that may come their way. For example, disaster management training and tools can equip employees with the skills and knowledge to handle unexpected crises, leading to a stronger and more confident team. By providing your employees with all the tools they need to succeed in their jobs, they will feel empowered to do their best work and ultimately be more engaged in their roles.

Listen To Employee Feedback and Do Something About It 

Encourage employee feedback, whether anonymous or not. Once you have their feedback, treat it as valuable advice and follow up on it. If you don’t do anything with employee feedback, they will believe that you don’t care whether they are happy and comfortable at work or not. You can’t get too attached to the way you have always done things if your team is giving you hints that they are unhappy – or outright telling you that something needs to change. 

Provide Incentives and Bonuses For Your Team 

You should provide more than just the bare minimum for your team. Incentives and bonuses are crucial and will help them to see that you appreciate them. Incentives and bonuses could be monetary, days out, vouchers, or even ESOP to give your team some ownership over the business. You can also give more days off than the minimum, gym memberships, and anything else you believe will encourage your team to work hard for you. 

Allow Flexibility 

Allowing flexibility within your workplace will help to keep your team engaged. If they need to be at home for some reason one day, allow them to work from home. Make sure they feel like they can come to you when they need time off, or have an issue that you can help with. Don’t be rigid in your way of thinking or the way you conduct your business. 

Building a team of engaged employees takes work, but it should be a focus for any business owner! 

How Student-Led ‘Energy Audits’ Are Cutting School Costs (and Lighting the Way Forward)

By Julie Starr • July 14, 2025
What happens when students stop waiting for adults to fix things and start conducting their own energy audits? Money gets saved. The lights get switched off. Data gets analyzed. And a quiet revolution in sustainability begins—inside schools that once overlooked their own inefficiencies. Across the globe, student-led energy audits are proving that change doesn't always need to come from a policy shift or a major capital budget. Sometimes, it begins with a clipboard, a spreadsheet, and a group of curious minds asking: Why are the hallway lights on at noon when sunlight floods the building? The Energy Detectives These audits aren’t science fair projects. They’re rigorous investigations, often done in collaboration with facilities staff, local environmental nonprofits, or even engineering mentors. Students go from classroom to classroom measuring electricity usage, checking for phantom loads , and identifying where heat is escaping in winter or air conditioning is leaking in summer. One high school in Ontario saved over $12,000 a year after its Grade 11 physics students ran an energy audit and suggested simple changes—LED upgrades, motion sensors in bathrooms, and smarter heating schedules. They didn’t just propose ideas. They pitched them with spreadsheets, thermal images, and payback timelines. It worked. Learning That Pays Off—Literally Unlike textbook learning, these audits blend real-world math, environmental science, economics, and persuasive communication. Students aren’t just learning about sustainability. They’re doing it. And the savings add up. From dimming overlit hallways to reprogramming HVAC systems that run all weekend for empty buildings, students are surfacing blind spots that administrators often overlook. In some districts, their findings are influencing energy policy. Elsewhere, the audits have inspired school boards to hire sustainability coordinators—often alumni of the student programs themselves. There’s something poetic about a school funding new books or laptops from money saved by students who found out the vending machines didn’t need to be plugged in 24/7. Why This Matters More Than Ever With education budgets tightening and utility costs rising, every dollar saved is a dollar that can go back into classrooms. And here’s where it gets interesting from a family finance perspective, too. If you’re a parent setting aside money for post-secondary savings, every bit of school efficiency helps. Fewer energy costs might mean more programming, better STEM facilities, or even bursaries. That raises a broader point: when families save for their children’s future, they often look into RESPs (Registered Education Savings Plans). And many wonder—is a RESP deduction available on my taxes? While contributions themselves aren’t deductible, the gains grow tax-free, and students often pay little to no tax when they withdraw the funds during school. A Movement Worth Replicating These audits aren’t just an exercise in environmentalism. They’re leadership labs. Students learn how to spot inefficiencies, speak up in board meetings, and make a business case for change. They don’t just flip switches—they shift mindsets. And they carry these habits into adulthood. The result? A generation growing up not only with climate anxiety, but also with tools to tackle it.

Smart Sensors, Smarter Supply Chains: Enhancing Traceability in Food & Beverage

By Julie Starr • June 20, 2025
In today’s competitive food and beverage (F&B) landscape, traceability is no longer a compliance checkbox—it’s a differentiator. The ability to track every step of a product’s journey, from origin to shelf, is vital for regulatory accuracy and to ensure brand integrity, supply chain agility, and consumer trust. Add smart sensors to the mix: the quiet, tireless observers revolutionizing supply chain intelligence. Traceability Has a Data Problem Despite digitization across many F&B operations, most traceability systems still rely on fragmented or manual data inputs. Batch numbers, barcodes, and handwritten logs often stand between a supplier and clarity when things go wrong. This approach struggles with latency and scale. When contamination or delays occur, root cause analysis is slow, costly, and damaging. Smart sensors shift this paradigm by embedding real-time, contextual intelligence into every stage of the supply chain . Whether monitoring humidity in transit or recording fill-level precision in bottling plants, they remove the guesswork by turning physical conditions into structured, time-stamped data. From Passive Monitoring to Active Optimization Sensors used to be reactive tools, alerting operators to anomalies. But smart sensors now play a proactive role in process control. They measure, and they interpret. For example, temperature sensors embedded in cold chain logistics can dynamically adjust cooling systems or flag threshold breaches before spoilage occurs. These advancements reduce waste and loss at a systemic level. In a production facility, smart sensors integrated with PLCs can enforce recipe compliance, verify clean-in-place processes, and detect micro-stoppages in real-time. This enables operations to pivot faster and isolate inefficiencies before they cascade downstream. Trust is Built on Transparency Consumers are paying more attention to what they eat and drink. They’re looking beyond labels, expecting visibility into how ingredients are sourced, processed, and handled. Smart sensors make this level of transparency achievable —without burdening manufacturers with excessive manual oversight. By capturing metadata throughout production and distribution, these sensors create a digital footprint that’s tamper-resistant and instantly accessible. When this data is integrated with a central platform, brands can respond confidently to audits, recalls, and quality assurance challenges with a level of precision that would be impossible through legacy systems. Intelligence Without Infrastructure Overhaul One common misconception is that adding smart sensors requires a top-down reinvention of supply chain infrastructure. In reality, companies can deploy edge sensors in a modular, scalable way. Many modern solutions offer plug-and-play functionality, allowing for fast integration with existing machinery and MES systems. This is where suppliers like alps-machine.com are reshaping expectations. Rather than pushing proprietary ecosystems, they design sensor-ready equipment with interoperability in mind. This future-proofs investment and keeps businesses nimble in the face of regulatory or market shifts. Designing for Data Longevity Sensors are only as powerful as the context they capture. A smart implementation ensures the data collected can be standardized, stored securely, and accessed meaningfully across departments. This means moving beyond local dashboards toward centralized, queryable datasets that inform everything from supplier contracts to marketing claims. As AI and predictive analytics become more accessible, these data-rich environments will unlock new capabilities—such as predicting demand spikes based on real-time freshness indicators or adjusting production schedules dynamically based on in-transit sensor feedback. Final Thoughts: Smarter Isn’t Optional Traceability isn’t solved by more paperwork—it’s solved by embedded intelligence. Smart sensors don’t just help businesses know what happened; they help prevent the wrong things from happening at all. For companies in the food and beverage sector, adopting smart sensors is less about chasing innovation and more about enabling resilience, speed, and confidence in every decision.