How to get best from your employees

All entrepreneurs and employers want to have best output from their employees that ultimately result in success of the organization. However, a common issue faced is that they are not satisfied with the performance of the employees. Closed observation reveals that in many cases both employers and employees are working at different frequencies of expectations and deliverables and this non-alignment negatively impact the overall organization goals.

Below are the few points that should be considered by employers to bridge the gap in the thought process and frequency of employers and employees and to get maximum desired output.

Communicate, communicate and communicate:

Most important factor is right and direct communication with the expectations, deliverables and outputs. In many instances, employers deemed that an employee must know its duties and obligations, which is a fair expectation. However, there is no harm in regular communication of expectations in case of below par performance of an employee. If an employee is continuously not able to perform as per expectation, an open “two -way” communication shall be held to understand the reason of shortcomings. We shall not assume that a person is incompetent for a job unless we try repeatedly in communicating the expectations and required level of efforts for the job. If someone is not able to do a job well, may be monotonous nature of job is a hindrance and engaging with the employee can overcome the non-performance issues.

Appreciate

Appreciation do wonders! Promotions, performance bonus, salary increments are various forms of appreciation, however a pat on the back, simple “thankyou” in email reply, praise in front of other colleagues cannot be replaced with any financial reward. During economic challenging times, it may not be possible to give financial rewards and if you continue to appreciate the employee even on the tasks which are part of their job description, it will keep pumping them to go the extra mile and outperform.

Knowledge transfer

Another critical factor is to transfer the business knowledge, management key decisions and factors that are impacting the business. All employees of the organization shall be fully aligned and updated with organization goals and challenges whether that are key operation staff or secretarial support staff. Regular business update meetings with employees gives them confidence, make them feel important for the business and motivate them to be part of the business success. Overall, employers shall focus to develop an entrepreneurial mindset among the employees.

Autonomy and freedom:

Share your authority matrix with the employees and delegate tasks to them. At times, it is not easy to trust the required level of competence from employees. However, the ultimate goal of a good employer is to develop responsibility in the employees. One should inspire the employees, encourage them to take decisions and built an attitude to measure and take calculated risk for business progress. Humans love freedom and autonomy and try to give as much opportunity to innovate as possible.

Friendly and courteous approach:

Employees shall always be approached in a friendly and courteous way. There is huge difference in perception of employees when same task given to an individual with the intention that he is being paid for this compared to a friendly request to be part of organization’s success. A motivated employee can do wonders and will act beyond his/her capabilities if they are working in a friendly environment with the feeling of ownership of organization’s goals.

Employee personal well being

Employee personal well-being (family and health) is equally important for an organization as its important for employees. If an employee is supported by organization during personal challenging times, it will bring a powerful emotional connection of employee with the organization. Humans never forget anyone who support them in tough times and the employee will go much out of way to outperform for the organization if he or she has the feeling that organization is not only interested in his work task but care about his entire family and well-being. Flexible hours and workspace shall be provided in case of family requirements on case-to-case basis or in case of support required for any health issues. 

Encouragement for holidays and breaks

Humans beings are most productive when they are happy and connected with the work task. A very important factor is to have enough rest, sleep and holidays to unwind. This principle is not only applicable to humans but even powerplants, computers and machineries need maintenance outages. If you continue working on excel file or a computer without closing for long, one day and most probably when you need it the most, the excel file or computer will crash. It is pertinent to take care and monitor the relaxing period and holidays. As an employer, it’s the responsibility to ensure that the employees take enough break so they can unwind and remain focused, energetic and refresh for future tasks. Many successful corporates are adding special holiday allowances as a benefit in addition to salary and making it mandatory to take holiday breaks as a stress-free employee is the best asset for any organization.

Providing opportunities for continuous professional development, team building events:

Continuous professional development and collaboration among employees is another essential criterion of organization’s success. Unfortunately, one of the first cuts during economic challenging times by many organizations are on budget of training and team building activities. This minor saving in cost is counterproductive. Employees need to be considered as the key asset of any organization whether service industry or manufacturing. Investing appropriately in your key asset always help in turning around the business. Always continue internal training sessions, team building events, and these are not necessary to be expensive but more importantly collaborative for employees. Employees should be provided best possible office space, best technological support and working environment for best results.

At the end, one should always keep in mind that everyone in the world has a reporting line. CEO’s are answerable to shareholders, business entrepreneurs to customers, president of countries to the electorates, sports celebrities to their fans etc. When we are not satisfied with the performance of our employees, we should always consider what we are expecting from our line manager and then try to implement those attributes in our behaviors towards the person reporting to us. Not easy to put ourselves in other shoes but one can see entirely different dimension of an issue if looked from another perspective. We should keep in mind that every person is unique and has different capacity / frequency to understand things, and successful entrepreneurs are the one who knows how to get best out of the employees.

For organizations to succeed, it is pertinent that its employees are not only most productive and efficient but should also be happier!!