Managing Employees

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.

Read the article and form your own opinions.   Don’t get bogged down in their specifics, but rather allow yourself to appreciate the work environment and how it promotes accountability, flexibility, loyalty and ultimately the bottom line for the company.

So having said that, let’s look more at workplace flexibility.

What exactly is a flexible workplace?    Generally it includes flexibility around hours worked, days, physical space where you work, part-time hours or job sharing.  Creating the right program for your company depends on you, your employees, your culture and the willingness to let go of established business policies. 

What flexible workplace options do you now have in place?  Evaluate how they are working and whether you can enhance them or should further market your programs to your employees.

A flexible work environment actually creates more employee accountability.  A parent is focused when they can work late tonight to complete a project and then can go to their child’s performance the next day.    This type of flexibility creates a strong working relationship between managers and employees.  It is not the only criteria for employee loyalty, though it does add significantly to higher performance levels.   Whenever we promote ‘accountability’ in employees, we win on the performance levels.

Before assuming that you can’t change the current structure and that work in the office between 9-5 is the only model, it is helpful to brainstorm on other possibilities.   There is an art to creating possibilities.   Being open to a flexible work environment doesn’t mean that you have to make major changes right away.  Rather, you can create small steps that build on change.

Check out the book “The Art of Possibility: Transforming Professional and Personal Life” by Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander.  The Authors open the door for you to explore ways to create a new perspective.    Whenever we make a change in our perception, we grow as professionals and members of our community.

Take some time to brainstorm around flexibility in your workspace.  Bring a group of employees together from different departments or different passages in their lives.   Give them the charge to come up with as many suggestions around workplace flexibility as they can.   Allow them the freedom of creativity.  

Final Thought

It’s important for you to be mindful that how you managed employees in the past is not going to keep you competitive in business or in the talent market.
  
Next Topic
Member Suggestion: How Does The New Manager Handle The Existing Manager They Are Replacing?  

Pat

Other Topics:
Manage By Listening
How To Tell If You Are A Micro-Manager
Are You A ‘People Friendly’ Manager?

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Brian Tracy speaks to corporate and public audiences on the subjects of Personal and Professional Development, including the executives and staff of many of America’s largest corporations.  I have purchased several of his CDs and have found that he presents the information in a clear, systematic and informative manner.  “The Science of Self-Confidence” is great to purchase for yourself and your employees.   Bring the tools in house so that employees can focus on building their confidence.
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Today’s business environment is based on ‘knowledge’ and creating a learning culture is critical for the continued growth of a business.  What does that mean in managing employees - you have to promote learning for yourself and your employees. 

Companies that support continuous learning are usually successful because training affects the bottom line of a business.

Since there is a shortage of talent with the necessary skills and knowledge to meet business demands, why not take your internal talent and grow them. Compensation is important but if you follow employee surveys, you will find that ‘learning’ is critical to an employee’s satisfaction and to the overall retention within a company.

Manager’s first reaction to providing training is that the employee will then move on to another company.   We know that long-term loyalty is not offered by employee or employer, so the goal is to maintain higher retention levels for the effectiveness of the business.  Training is one tool that works. 

Employees respond favorably to employers who provide advance training.   Just make sure that the training can be applied to your specific business.   Guide your employees in their training efforts by informing them of the business goals so they can make suitable educational choices.

The ‘x’ and ‘y’ generations expect to be challenged and look for opportunities to develop their careers through new projects, promotions and access to formal learning benefits.  Employees want the certificates and advanced degrees and are willing to do the work and consider training a required benefit to working at a company.  They recognize that advance education is critical to their future employment.

What needs to be done?  

• Create for each employee a ‘learning’ plan based on his or her current roles as well as their career growth within the organization.  
• If you don’t have the budget to provide a tuition-reimbursement program to your employees, spend time brainstorming on how to create your company’s ‘learning’ culture. 

Here are some ideas that you can start your brainstorming with:

Internal Learning

• Business knowledge – create a training that presents the business basics so each employee can understand how their responsibilities support the business.
• Career paths – yearly review of the employee’s career growth within the company.
• In-House Training – subject matter experts can share their expertise to build and enhance the depth of industry knowledge within the company.
• Library – build the company library by creating a book allowance.   You can allocate a certain amount for each employee to spend each year for business-related reading materials.  They would have to put in a ‘book request’ with justification.   You reimburse the employee for the book and then add it to the company library.   This way you encourage your employees to build their industry knowledge as well as add to the library so others can increase their knowledge. 
• Mentoring – this is a classic program that is part of succession as well as management training programs where you partner strong performers with more senior management to learn the ‘ropes’ of the business. 
• Stretch projects – provide employees with ‘stretch’ opportunities with project or leadership work. 
• Subscriptions – bring in appropriate business related magazines or journals for the continuous growth of employees. 
• Training Manuals – create appropriate learning manuals for specific procedures within the organization.  
• New Employee Training Programs – this is critical in the success of an employee.  Even if you are a small company, have a program in place that successfully integrates the new employee into the work environment.  See my previous posting “Retaining Your Talent – New Hire.” 
• …and lots more.

External Learning

• Formal educational resources – colleges and universities
• Professional organizations offer specific classes on industry information
• Business organizations – For example, American Management Association
• E-learning training on specific topics
• Online degree programs are providing advanced degrees to meet the demands of time and information intensive environments.

Note: If there is a performance-related issue, sending someone out to a training session may or may not be the answer.  What is critical in creating a ‘learning’ plan is that the training matches the individual.    Performance-based issues can be attributed to a lack of knowledge, interest or an inability to perform the essential functions of the job.   So use your training efforts and dollars wisely.

Final Thought
Make learning and development part of your conversations with your staff.  Even if your employees are non-exempt, encourage them to take on more challenges, to increase the quality of their work and to learn something new.    Continuous learning keeps the employee fresh and interested in their performance.  Otherwise, they become stale in their work and performance becomes ‘average’ or ‘mediocre.’   Every employee influences the bottom line.

That is why I have this blog…to help you learn how to manage employees better.   I’m not a learning and development specialist and you may have something to teach me.  Feel free to add your comments to any blog post…so others and I can continuously learn from each other.

Next Topic
Flexible Work Environment

Pat

Other Topics:
3 Different Types of Employee Goals
How To Create Employee Goals
Tips For Effective Performance Reviews
That Time of The Year…Again…Performance Reviews

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BrianTracy.com – Accelerated Learning (Six CDs,workbook)
Learn a system of proven, practical techniques that increase your ability to learn and remember names, facts, figures and business information 400 percent faster than today. Learn how to memorize quickly, speed read, improve your brainpower and multiply your intelligence.
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In today’s business environment, managing employees is one of the many responsibilities a manager needs to handle during the day.  Though deciding to do your best in developing and supporting your employees will make a big difference in their  productivity as well as your own.   How you manage your employees affects your overall performance.  So how do you give your best when there is too much to do? 

Here are some ideas to help you decide what is important.

• Are you clear on what you and your team are required to accomplish?  If not, take the time to rectify that.
• You need to know what still needs to be done?  Part of our stress is not knowing all the moving parts.   Gather a list of what is completed and what still needs to be done.
• You now have a list of what needs to be done.  This is the time to ask “why” something is important.  Systems develop and not everything is still important to do. 
• Since you and your employees can each only do one thing at a time, there will always be too much to do.   This is what management is all about…to prioritize and decide what is most important. 
• You influence your employees more by communicating face-to-face rather than email.  For virtual employees, call them.  Email is so impersonal and your goal is to build a relationship with your team members.   If you have hundreds of employees under you, train the supervisors to build relationships with their direct reports.  Limit your email use with employees.  
• If you can’t meet regularly with each member of your team, have senior members become mentors or “buddies” to junior staff.  Encourage everyone to get up and speak to others rather than emailing.  
• You have to be ruthless about your time.   Track your time – where are you spending it…in lengthy meetings or email.   These are your time robbers and you need to figure out a way to diminish those activities.    If email is your time robber, get someone else to pre-read and handle most of your email, have your email automatically filed in it’s appropriate category so you can read when you are ready, or have a separate email address for customers and employees and address what’s important first. 
• Delegate…Delegate…Delegate!   Bring in an intern or two to handle the routine functions of your job or your department.  Your team can also be freed up to handle their “to do” list.   Have someone attend a meeting for you and report back.  Take the time to brainstorm on all the activities that you can hand over to others and then find solutions to do just that. 
• Not all companies recognize that a manager needs to develop their management skills on a regular basis.  Schedule some learning time for yourself.

Final Thought

There is usually one overall focus for any company…to provide a service or a product and build strong and lasting relationships with the customers.  Your employees service those customers.  Since it’s known already that a key component of an employee’s success is their relationship with the manager, it’s important to focus your attention on them.   

Start today…start with something small such as sending one less email to an employee and instead speaking directly to them.

Next Topic
Create a “Learning” Plan

Pat

Other Topics:
What To Look For In a Coach
Have Your Considered Management Coaching…For You?
Are You a ‘Burned Out’ Manager?

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The Experts Guide To Managing Your Time
Solve All Your Time Management Woes. 27 Top Experts Spill Their Secrets, Covering Procrastination, Prioritizing, Scheduling, Organizing, Clutter, Work Life Balance, Efficiency, Productivity, Waste, Wastage, To Do List,todo, Tips, Techniques And Tricks.

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Have you found when managing your employees that they bring different levels of self-confidence to their work?  We know that the more confidence an individual possesses the more efficient and productive they can be in meeting their goals. If you view your role in managing employees as a mutual working relationship, then you would want to be part of nourishing their confidence.

I would suggest the following important points to use as a guide in providing support and guidance in increasing your employees “confidence muscles.”

• Listen for your employee’s current level of confidence as it may change given the specific project they are working on.  Each person brings their personal beliefs about their capabilities to the job.  As you monitor their level of performance, you can observe how they handle different situations.  In managing employees, you have so many opportunities to be part of their success. 
• Accentuate the Positive – If there is one booster that increases an employee’s confidence it’s focusing on their knowledge, skills or past contributions.  Managing employees by their strengths build their confidence and in turn, adds more to the overall success of the department.  Encourage your employees to acknowledge their contributions to the team.  Try to use the 80-20 rule…spend 80% of your time with an employee addressing their strengths and 20% helping them handle any issues that are hampering their performance.  Why…because you receive the most value from their strengths. 
• Set clear direction and expectations around performance so your team members know what is expected.  The clearer they are about what they need to do, the more confident they will be in implementing their work.
• Train – give employees the chance to succeed by providing training.   Even if you hire talent with experience, they still need to learn.
• Plan – help your employees create and stay focused on their goals.  Their planning skills should cover yearly, quarterly, monthly and daily.   Each day they need to stay focus on what is important and not get swayed by interruptions and reactivity.  
• Proactive – encourage your team members to be active in increasing their level of confidence.   Some ways are to take on new projects, reading business or industry information, and CDs and lectures on building self-confidence. 
• Recognition – take the time to recognize an employee who has done excellent work.   This spot acknowledgement adds to the employee’s confidence and they will continue to perform.  Don’t assume they know that their work was great…tell them. 
• Encourage your employees to take risks…either by making suggestions or trying something different.   
• Follow up on a regular basis with your employees.  It would be great if you could meet monthly, but at least on a quarterly basis.  

Final Thought

Start the whole process over by listening.  Your ability to listen will boost your own level of confidence as well as the confidence of your employees.
 

Next Topic
There is Too Much To Do

Pat

Other Topics:
Asking the Right Questions
Strengths Of Your Employees
Recognition – Ways to Motivate Your Employees

********************************
Brian Tracy speaks to corporate and public audiences on the subjects of Personal and Professional Development, including the executives and staff of many of America’s largest corporations.  I have purchased several of his CDs and have found that he presents the information in a clear, systematic and informative manner.  “The Science of Self-Confidence” is great to purchase for yourself and your employees.   Bring the tools in house so that employees can focus on building their confidence.
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Unless you have been working alone all your life you quickly realize that not all people get along with each other.   In managing employees, you will have the opportunity to run interference between two employees who are in conflict with each other.  There are endless reasons why people challenge each other, and you are required to develop conflict resolution skills in order to diminish internal squabbling.  We can’t make everyone look and act the same but we can help employees learn to deal with differences in the workplace.

If the issue is performance related such as not providing a co-worker with the right information, then you will need to handle this differently.   The type of issues addressed here is not performance related, but rather different styles in performing work and interacting with each other.
 

Examples of workplace issues

• Employees interrupting others while they are concentrating on a project.   People have different work styles…some need to interact more; others need to focus all of their attention on what they are doing.   This is a common issue within the workplace.
• Competitive issues where employees will try to undermine other’s performance.
• Physical space - each person has different comfort levels around mess.   In a cubicle, there are “neatniks” and “messies,” and those styles irritate each other. 
• Food in the cubicle….some people are sensitive to different smells.
• Borrowing other’s supplies, without asking.
• Playing music – employees like different types of music.

…and many more irritations that employees struggle with that reduce productivity in the workplace.

What are your employee’s responsibilities?
Employees have the right to work in an environment that enhances their productivity.   At the same time, employees need to recognize that they will not get along with everyone and can learn how to solve their problems.  They can’t just come with the complaint and expect you to solve the issue for them.  

There are numerous solutions to the same problem.   For example, what if someone plays music in the cubicle and it interferes with an employee’s ability to concentrate on their work.

• Handle the situation as soon as it surfaces as an issue for them.  The longer they wait, the more frustrated they will become, and their emotions will block their ability to resolve the issue.
• They can present the issue to the other person in the “I” format.  I have difficulty concentrating when the music is on.  Maybe music helps you think but it breaks my concentration.  How can we resolve this issue since we are both in the same cubicle?
• Ask if they can use “headphones” to listen to their music.
• If they are reluctant to speak to the other person, if possible, they can take their work to an open cubicle or the cafeteria.
• They can ask to swap cubicle with others whose style of working is more complimentary to them.
• Speak with the manager.

What can you do!
Employees may have to work with others they don’t like…how can you help them understand their role in the dynamics and help them build their problem-solving skills.

You can’t control every situation but you can be proactive in helping co-workers get along.   Create some “getting along” policies.  Open workspace is common now and employees on more on top of each other.  Most conflict occurs because of misunderstandings and assumptions about the other person’s intentions.  Providing employees with guidelines or etiquette in working together helps minimize many smaller workplace issues.   Create a small committee to come up with some common issues and how to deal with them in the workplace.

When managing employees, it is helpful to understand how each of your team members deals with conflict.  Here again each person has different comfort zones and the more you know about the individual employee, the more you can support them in resolving their workplace issues.  It’s important to handle issues between co-workers quickly because the longer you wait the more embedded the issue will become and the more difficult it is for employees to change their opinions.  

Final Note
Workplace respect is the responsibility of both you and your employees.  Your role is to provide guidelines and standards for the work environment.  Even with the best intentions, individuals don’t get along and your role is to help them find solutions to their workplace issues.  Strong management skills include the ability to handle conflict within your teams.  Check out this book: 

How To Reduce Workplace Conflict And Stress: How Leaders And Their Employees Can Protect Their Sanity And Productivity From Tension And Turf Wars by Anna Maravelas.  Managing employees means also managing conflict that surface between different people.   This book provides many workplace conflict examples as well as helps you navigate the daily frustrations that employees present to you.

Next Topic
Help Your Employee Build Their “Confidence Muscles”

Pat

Other Topics:
Manage By Listening
Help Your Employees Build Their ‘Confidence Muscles’
Asking the Right Questions

 **********************************************************
The Experts Guide To Managing Your Time
Solve All Your Time Management Woes. 27 Top Experts Spill Their Secrets, Covering Procrastination, Prioritizing, Scheduling, Organizing, Clutter, Work Life Balance, Efficiency, Productivity,To Do List, Tips, Techniques And Tricks.

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