Managing Employees

Are you having fun as a manager or is it a lot of work? Is your team enjoying themselves? How often do you hear laughter flowing through the workspace?

We get so busy doing the work that we forget how important it is to enjoy the people we work with. Everyone is there to do a job and that’s fairly obvious to most people. Yet, as their manager, you need to know that happy employees are productive and definitely more loyal to you and the company.

Final Step

What do you do after you have coached and counseled an employee and they still do not meet performance expectations or correct the behavioral issue(s)? It can be a challenge to decide if an employee is going to succeed in their role.

You can’t change a person’s effort or behavior…only they can. What you can do is give them:

·Clear performance expectations,
·effective training and
·provide them with a respectful work environment.

Managing the Performance

The previous blog entry (Part 1) evolved around questions to ask when facing a performance problem with an employee. The questions are there so you can better understand the context for the performance issue.

Communication between you and your team is critical to your success and your employee’s success. Most employees are eager to perform at a higher level and your early intervention will guide them to being more productive.

A major daily function for you as a manager is to handle employee performance. This is a challenging aspect of your role, especially since you have business deliverables demanding your attention.

I’ve broken down how to handle poor performance with your employees into three sections and each one will be handled in separate blog entries:

-Part 1: Organizing the Discussion
-Part 2: Managing the Performance
-Part 3: Final Decision

If your job as manager is to coach and motivate your team for high performance levels, how do you deal with the poor performer? Performance revolves around two distinct issues:

Micro-management is a term that has surfaced in the business world to indicate when a manager watches everything an employee does and tries to control their performance. The basic reaction to this style of management is it stifles the growth of employees as well as the business.

An employee knows immediately when they are being micro-managed. However, a manager doesn’t always recognize that they are micro-managing their staff.

How do you know if you are a micro-manager?

Do you get frustrated if someone on your team makes a decision without consulting you?