Your family business is doing well. You have a clear vision for the future and know what actions are required to get your there. (If you aren’t too sure, check out this article). But somehow your employees seem to live on another planet. You expect (X) from them, they give you (X-10). Or worse, (Y)!
Many businesses are quick to say that getting good employees is increasingly difficult. And that’s true. With many new opportunities available, attracting talent is difficult. That’s an uncontrollable factor. Are there some changes you can make within your business that will make your employees superheroes? As well as make your organization an irresistible magnet for the right professionals? You bet!
Share your vision
Its nice to have a clear vision and strategy in your head. It’s even nicer to have it well articulated and shared with employees. It gives employees a common goal to aspire to and provides purpose to the work they do. Don’t forget to keep reminding employees how their work fits into the overall goals of your business.
Make responsibilities clear
Maybe Messi or Ronaldo don’t need to be given specific instructions on their role in a game. For the rest, being sure of what’s expected of you is important. You need to have clear roles and responsibilities for each employee. And make people truly own those responsibilities. Performance Goals and associated Appraisals should have a significant linkage to employee responsibilities. Documented business processes also play a key role in letting employees know their responsibilities.
Communicate, communicate
Talk to your employees. Anytime you get the opportunity. Understand what drives them. Explore issues and challenges they face. Lower the power distance between yourself and the rest of the organization.
Recognize and reward
Keep celebrating small successes. Recognition is important to employees. It shows that their effort is being noticed and appreciated. Rewards need not be monetary. Even a certificate of appreciation or something similar works well.
Be careful of the halo effect
We all have our favourite employees. And it’s fitting that performing employees get amply recognized. What’s not nice is assuming that everything a ‘great employee’ does is great. That’s a demotivator for the rest of the team. “Nothing I do will give me the recognition that the great employee gets”.
Give them the right tools
As much as we would like, employees don’t come with all skillsets required. They need training in specific skillsets to enable them to do their job. Equally important, they need the right tools to do their job. You can’t, for example, expect an employee to make a detailed project plan without Microsoft Project or equivalent installed on their computer.
Keep your commitments
Promised to discuss something with your employee? Keep your promise. Told an employee you will take a decision about something? Either make the decision or tell the employee that there will be a delay. When you keep your commitments to your employees, they feel valued. And know that you are there to support and guide them in their work.
Be fair
Though last, this one is possibly the most important. Be fair in all your dealing with employees. Whether its fairness in compensation (does matter significantly!), leave, timings or anything else.
Closing note
What happens when an employee doesn’t add value despite all your best efforts? Option 1 is to redeploy them into a role more in line with their skillsets. Option 2 is to part ways. While Option 2 is distasteful, its sometimes the best option for the employee. Inertia keeps many employees stuck in jobs misaligned with their skills. Being pushed to search for new opportunities gives them a much greater chance of finding something they are passionate about.
Nice article. Many good points!
Just a couple of more thoughts more to share from my industry experience.
1. Usually employees are not fully empowered. In other words there is often misalignment between their authority and responsibility. Actively looking out for these misalignment’s and removing them goes a long way in making people feeling empowered and respected. The best times to identify such misalignment’s are when dealing with “fires” or “crisis situations”.
2. Managers are usually not well trained in giving instructions to subordinates. Most managers usually instruct their people on the “what to do” and rarely on the “why to do”. Without the why, subordinates often end up interpreting the importance of the instruction based on their own intuition and the end result on tasks is less than satisfactory.
Great points Trivikram! Yes, the authority-responsibility mismatch creates issues. While a ‘fire’ may be the most common time to identify the misalignment, its best that they are actively identified prior to a fire. Helps in putting out the fire faster!
Your second point is exactly the reason why employees should be made to understand the goals of the organization. Once everyone understands how their work aligns to the organizational goals, its so much easier to get quality work done!
Thanks for your valuable inputs, Trivikram!
Very interesting and surely opens my eyes. I especially like the recognition that every employee is not equipped automatically with the tools physical and mental to handle a job, He has to be trained.
Thanks Blaise! Even Batman can’t do too much without his Batmobile and other fancy stuff!
Seriously, giving an employee the required tools – hard or soft- can make a huge difference to performance.
Thanks for your inputs, Blaise!