Making Sure Your Staff Are Performing to the Best of Their Ability
When you take on staff, you take on a lot of responsibility and work in simply managing them. While staff will form the backbone of your business, keeping the cogs turning and pushing things forward, they also need to know what is expected of them and to be provided with everything they need to perform to the best of their ability. As a business owner, it’s your job to ensure that these boxes are being ticked. Here are some areas to focus on to ensure that your staff
can
perform well and benefit your business as best possible.
Ensure Responsibilities and Expectations are Clear
The first step to ensuring that your team is performing well is to make sure that your definition of “performing well” is clear. Your staff members need to know what is expected of them in order to organize their time, work, and performance to reach the goals expected of them. This is where KPIs can come into play. KPIs are “key performance indicators” and they essentially set the bar that you expect your employees to reach. Each KPI you set should be realistic and achievable. Purposefully setting goals that are too high can cause staff burnout and job dissatisfaction, as people feel under too much pressure. You should also set clear deadlines for tasks to ensure that your staff knows when projects and other work will be due. This also helps with performance monitoring using an online assessment platform , allowing you to provide more work if your employee doesn’t have enough to do and to intervene and resolve problems if KPIs aren’t being met.
Provide Team Building Opportunities
As the old saying goes, teamwork makes the dream work. Your team needs to work together well to be as productive as possible. Sure, individual brilliance is desirable and your employees do need to be able to work independently to get individual elements of tasks completely. But they also need to work together for group projects to come to life. It’s important to note that, sometimes, you will have to get involved to encourage teams to work together seamlessly. People are only human and, often, team members may find it difficult to break the ice and get talking. At other times, there may be conflicts that need to be resolved. Here are some suggestions that can help with both of these situations.
Arrange Team Building Activities
Let’s start with breaking the ice. The best way to achieve this is team building activities and there are a number of ways you can approach this. Some companies choose to do regular, short team building activities that get people engaged with one another on a regular basis. Simple and straightforward ideas include coffee breaks, walks to get outside and chat with one another, ice breaker conversations, and more. Others prefer large-scale events, perhaps annually or bi-annually. These can include full-blown team-building days, packed with activities. If you like, you can try a combination of the two.
Have Conflict Resolution Strategies in Place
If employees are having conflict with one another, you need to do what you can to resolve this and get everyone back on neutral territory. HR departments are great at managing this, so try to make sure you have a HR team or specialist within your company. Strategies can include supervised conversations in a private and confidential environment, as well as steps such as separating staff members who particularly cannot get on.
Provide the Right Software and Tools
Keeping up to date with the most recent software and tools can help your employees to perform as best possible. You can have the most skilled and competent team in the world, but if they don’t have what it takes to complete their jobs to a high standard, they’re not going to be able to work their best. Of course, when managing different roles and departments, you may need suggestions when it comes to keeping on top of all of this information. Ask members of each team to fill in regular surveys detailing whether the software you’re providing is up to scratch and, if not, to make recommendations that could resolve issues the individual or team is having. You may want to make these surveys anonymous, as people can often avoid being completely honest with their answers if they think there could be some sort of personal repercussion.
These are just a few steps you can take to help your teamwork to the best of their ability at all times. Keep them in mind and try them out – they could really help to get the ball rolling!
