‘How can I manage employees effectively?’, is an age-old question HR managers, team leaders, and anyone in a position of authority have had to grapple with since the emergence of the modern workplace.
While it isn’t necessarily a difficult question to answer, the answer often varies; different workforces, different types of leaders, and varying organizational goals produce different answers. That being said, there are a few strategies and tips no well-meaning manager can ignore.
In our post, we uncover some of the basics you need to lock down if you want to manage employees effectively. You can thank us later!
One of the basic, most profound things you can do as a manager is to appreciate hard work when you see it.
Human beings seek validation and some choose to channel this desire through their work. If you neglect to take the time to thank and validate those employees who consistently put in hard work and display loyalty and commitment to your company, you’re bound to lose your hardest workers.
A simple ‘thank you’ or ‘good job’ doesn’t take much time or effort to say or type, so make sure you make it a part of your day to give praise and thanks when they’re due.
You can also try and convert your sentiments into something physical and reward your employees with an appropriate token of appreciation from time to time!
At this moment in time, self-awareness is an exciting and feverish trend sweeping through workplaces in the US, and for good reason. By understanding who you are, what your hot button issues are, and what encourages and motivates you – to name just a few things – you become better at what you do.
This is especially true at the management level; once you understand yourself, it becomes easier for you to manage other people. How so?
Well, imagine you’re dealing with a difficult employee. If you understand your own biases, fears, and dislikes, you ensure that you’re not projecting your own issues onto the employee in question and leave your biases at the door when you get to work every day.
That, alone, will make you a better manager than most.
As a manager, good communication is one of the most important factors to get right if you want to manage employees effectively.
In fact, clear communication is crucial to the overall success of your company, without which, your workforce will lack the coordination and cooperation required to get the job done and achieve company goals.
Without communication, you can’t build trust or any kind of relationship with your colleagues, which can be fatal to your success as a manager of a team.
While a considerable manual effort is required to get your communication right, you can make this process easier with the use of modern collaboration tools and technology. There’s plenty of employee management software dedicated to this specific function, so find what works best for you and add it to your workplace.
Part and parcel of managing employees effectively is transparency.
For employees to thrive and give their best in the workplace, they need to feel supported and that they can trust those responsible for managing them. Interestingly, transparency happens to be one of the greatest tools you can leverage to build trust with your employees.
By maintaining complete transparency, especially when it comes to employee matters, problems are solved faster, teams are built easier, relationship-building is more authentic, and you can spur high levels of performance.
What more do you need!
To manage employee effectively, you require a great deal of self-awareness, wisdom, and patience on your part. An absence of these factors can make your teams hard to manage, contribute to poor performance, and yield disappointing results.
By considering some of the tips and best practices we’ve outlined in our post, become the manager every employee wish they had.
