1st February, 2018
Learn how to manage and support your staff in the time it takes to apply sunscreen.
Just like you’d keep reapplying sunscreen during a day at the beach to protect yourself from the sun, it’s important to continuously manage and support your staff to prevent them from burning out.
In the next seven minutes, we’ll slip, slop and slap up your knowledge on employee management.
We’ll take you through how to onboard new staff, how to manage your team and how to review their progress.
Happy workers are productive workers. Putting effective management systems in place to support your employees goes a long way towards making sure they’re as productive and effective as possible.
The way you manage your employees starts well before they walk through the door – onboarding begins as soon as you offer them the job.
The first few months of a new job is incredibly important for new employees. Not only do they learn what their new job is about, but they build rapport with the management and their co-workers.
These first impressions a business makes on new employees can determine whether an employee stays with you long term, or starts looking for a new job before their probation period ends.
Onboarding is not just about training, either. While it’s important that employees have a clear sense of the expectations of their role and how to execute their tasks effectively, onboarding is about helping staff fit into the company socially and culturally.
Some practical tools to help the onboarding process could include:
It’s a good idea to give new employees welcome pack that has critical information about the business. This should be sent to employees as soon as they accept your job offer.
On their first day, make new employees feel valued and supported by introducing them to everybody and taking them for a coffee or lunch.
Pairing up new employees with a friendly colleague that they can ask all sorts of questions to will help them feel comfortable in their new workplace.
Creating opportunities for new employees to bond with their team is very helpful in helping them settle in. A welcome lunch or Friday night drinks at the end of their first week can make a huge difference to feeling like a part of the team.
Managing your team is all about the systems you put in place to help your employees be as efficient as possible. To do this, it’s important that they feel valued, supported and encouraged to grow.
Two tools that are useful in helping to manage your team are KPIs and Development Plans.
Key performance indicators (KPIs) are targets that measure how well an employee is performing. They are discussed and mutually agreed on by the employer and employee.
KPIs will vary between employees, depending on the role and their level of experience. While a bricklayer in a construction company will have KPIs around how many bricks they can lay a day, a salesperson from the same company will have KPIs focused around revenue they’ve brought to the business.
You should put your employee’s KPIs in a written format to help keep them accountable to their goals.
Development planning is about putting together a plan for your employees’ professional growth.
A development plan will set out your employee’s development goals and how you’re going to work with them to achieve them. It might be focused on developing specific skills through on-the-job training or with external courses.
Once you have your employees’ KPIs and development goals sorted, it’s important to catch up on these regularly to help track the progress.
Formal reviews are usually conducted every six months or once a year, which gives employers and employees enough time to make visible improvement.
A review is also the opportunity to talk about taking on more responsibility and a potential pay rise. It’s also useful to have more regular, informal catch ups where employees can talk to you or their managers about how they’re going with their work, how they’re feeling about the company and culture and where they need more support.
Having regular meetings will help keep communication open and keep your employees engaged.
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