It should not come as a shock that effective employee management can make up the thin line between failure and success. Happy and motivated employees will skyrocket your company to success, while negative and energy-draining ones will tear your organization apart from within.
On a theoretical level, employee management is based on ideas and processes developed to increase worker motivation, productivity, and performance. It involves:
- Selection
- Measurement
- Monitoring
- Interaction
- Reward
- Discipline
Bottom line is that leaders in an organization have a huge role in implementing effective employee management. Managers need to focus on building trust from the beginning and, together with smart tools and systems, create healthy long-term relationships.
1. Clear communication from day one
Effective communication is the foundation of any organization looking to grow successfully. Without effective communication, professional relationships between colleagues or manager/employee are unable to establish trust. Lack of communication often results in ambiguous goals.
In order to communicate clearly, each manager should remember the following three bullets:
- Be approachable. Keep an open-door policy so that employees easily reach out if they need to talk.
- Share company updates, information, and announcements with your employees. Make them feel included in what is going on.
- Encourage feedback and be open for input. This creates a safe space and welcoming environment.
2. Set clear goals – both individual and collective
Setting employee goals is a key responsibility for any manager. Measurable and attainable goals can actually strengthen the business, but also help the employee in their day to day work. These benefits include:
- Enhanced focus on short- and long-term success for the company
- Guidelines and benchmarks for performance reviews
- Increased employee engagement
Do not forget to set goals on a team level as well. Clear group goals can successfully serve as the glue that holds the group together.
3. Interact on a regular basis
Effective employee management is highly dependent on regular feedback and communication. It encapsulates everything from measurement, monitoring, and interaction as described earlier. Make sure to create ways for both formal and informal two-way feedback between managers and employees.
Make sure to use different formats to get a better understanding of what is working and what can be improved. Employees can prefer different formats. Here are some examples of meeting types that your organization should hold:
- Walk and talks or one-to-one sessions to discuss well-being and workload.
- Quarterly or annual performance reviews to follow-up on employee growth.
- Team meetings to make sure the whole team is aligned with overarching goals.
4. Use tools to facilitate the process
It’s difficult to see real progress without using tools to facilitate the process. Notes are stored locally on managers’ computers or, even worse, on the cloud where it is accessible for other people within the organization.
Using an HR system does not only create a safe space to store the data; it ties in nicely with transparency as discussed earlier. Employees can easily look at notes from previous meetings to keep track of what’s been decided and how they are developing towards their goals.
Summary
Employee management is not just a one-person job. It can comprise of many parts that can take up plenty of time and effort, such as performance reviews, setting up a grievance system, and more. Fortunately, you don’t have to work on employee management alone. It shouldn’t solely land on the HR department’s table.
HR should, however, create and cultivate a sustainable employee management structure that makes it easy for managers to follow through. An HR system can help you with encouraging engagement and make both managers and employees involved.