Managing Employees

Every working environment has a culture…the way they do business. Miriam-Webster.com provides this definition:

Culture - the set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that characterizes an institution or organization.

Our intuition reads the culture of a company, even without being aware of the stated values and practices of the company.  What would you say are the shared values, attitude, goals and practices of your company?    Step back, look at the employees, and ask how do they perform their work and react to you or other managers.  Do they seem empowered to do their work?  Yes, there are individual differences, yet overall we learn a lot by the way employees perform their responsibilities.   What about the customers?  How do they feel about working with the company?

With managing employees, negotiating with outside vendors, collaborating with other departments, balancing the budget and finding time to be creative, I know you are saying to yourself that you are “just too busy.”  I hear myself mumbling “I have so much to do” and I don’t feel that great when I say it.  So I’m assuming that you are not happy with your long list of ‘to do’s’ that consume your time.  

There is a strong belief that the more you have to do, the more important you seem.   Is that true?   I certainly don’t feel important when I face my long list.  Rather I feel more like an overworked, underpaid employee.  I work for myself.

Smashing the clock at BestBuy.com….wow…read this article.  Is your work environment anything like what is happening at BestBuy?  May be your business can’t operate the exact way, but how open are you to creating the necessary flexibility that fits your business.

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_50/b4013001.htm

In reading this article, I learned an innovative and effective way to managing employees.  What I gathered from this article is that the manager is most effective when they help their employees become ‘accountable’ for their performance. Today’s manager has to be focused on results and not on the employee’s presence in the workplace.  That is when flexibility in the workplace becomes a viable option.

You have done all the important steps to drive change in your department:

• Reviewed what needs to change – brainstormed and created a project plan
• Captured potential reactions to the change – this way you can organize how to communicate the change
• Plan the Changes – developed the rollout steps
• Communication of the change(s) – created a project plan just for your verbal and written communication around the change(s)
• Implementation of the change(s)

… now you want to move on to other projects or business responsibilities.