If you run a business, one of the most important aspects to that is always going to be managing your people. You need to do all you can to ensure they are going to be well looked after, but also well-managed, and this is something that you can approach in a lot of different ways. There are also a lot of elements to it that you will need to make sure you get right.
In this post, we are going to take a look at some of the most important elements to managing your staff. As long as you have thought about the following things, you’ll find it’s a much simpler and easier thing to achieve, and that your business benefits greatly from it. Let’s take a look.
It Starts With Hiring
Before anything else, you need to make sure that you are hiring the right people at the right times. This is basically going to make every element of managing people easier, so it’s hugely important that you are focused on this. If you have the right people in your team, they are going to be a better natural fit, and this means that many HR and other personnel issues are a lot simpler to rectify – with many other such issues simply never cropping up at all.
All this is to say that you will benefit, as will your team, from having as much of a focus on hiring the right people as possible. And to do that, you need to know what kinds of people you want to have in your team. What skills and experience are you hoping for? What personality do you want in the office? All of this really matters, and it really makes a difference.
Effective Communication
Perhaps the most important thing of all is that you are communicating effectively with your staff. When there is effective communication, it tends to mean that there is more respect, a freer flow of ideas, and generally a much better chance of everyone working as a team. It is also a fundamental part of managing your people, as a good manager is always one who is able to communicate well.
To that end, it’s important that you are communicating well as a manager. This will also encourage the same kind of response from your employees, and you’ll find that it improves things across the board considerably. This is an example where working on yourself can bring about improvements in the business itself too.
Emotional Awareness
You have to remember that your people are people – and they need to be treated as such. In other words, make sure that you are doing all you can to speak with them as human beings. This requires a particular emotional awareness, and that is something you can’t really overstate here. Having a good amount of emotional intelligence definitely makes a manager a good one, and stops them from treating people as robots – or worse.
If you think this is an area that you might need to work on, it’s perfectly possible to do so, and shouldn’t take you too long at all if you stick with it. As long as you stick with it, you’ll find that you are going to have a much happier and stronger team as a result, with whom you have a better relationship as a whole.
Time Management
There are two main areas of time management which matters to you as a manager. First, there is the role of scheduling and drawing up rotas, which can be a very important thing to get right, and can take time to do so. This is vital for ensuring that the team works generally as well as possible, and that everyone knows what is expected of them. So you as the manager need to make sure that you are figuring this stuff out as well as you can. It can take time, but it’s worth it.
The other side of the coin is to keep on top of your employees’ attendance and time. This is easy enough to do, but you will need to make sure you have the right software and tools in place to do it. If you track employee attendance properly with the right technology, it’s a really simple thing and easy to do.
You also need to make sure you have a decent approach to this, as the last thing you want is to make anyone feel as though they are being too closely watched. So it’s about having a light touch and approach to time management and tracking. If you can do that right, it will bring the best results.
Delegation
You may have heard in the past that a good manager delegates. Well, this isn’t just one of those things people say – it really is true. The better you delegate, the better that is for everyone in your team. There are a few main reasons for this. One is that it frees up your time to do the work you really need to do, which allows you to be a better boss too. It also means you are giving more responsibility to your employees, which people tend to respond to really well.
So delegation really is important, but how can you ensure you are doing it right? Like much else, this is often a case of simply trying to play with it and see what happens. If you find you are giving people too much to do, or work that is above their level, then you can tone it down a little, and vice versa. As long as you keep a conscious approach, you should be able to delegate effectively and properly, and the results can be positive for everyone in the team.
Trusting Your People
There is something to be said for having a lot of trust in the people you manage. If you can show them that you trust them to do their work effectively, it helps in fostering a much better relationship between you and them, and this is what you should be aiming for in general with your management style. So you should try to ensure you are doing all you can to build this trust in whatever way that might be necessary.
You might be wondering how to achieve that. Actually it’s relatively simple. It’s about giving people the tools they need, delegating the right amount, and then seeing what happens. You will find that this is a calculated risk with great reward, and it’s really worthwhile.
Making Decisions
Ultimately, as the manager, you need to make the big top-down decisions which affect everyone. This is the responsibility of a manager, and it’s something you need to make sure you are happy to take on. But that is not to say it’s always going to be easy, and you should make sure you are prepared for that too. If you make the big decisions right, then the smaller decisions your team makes will be right too. On the whole, that means a stronger process for everyone.
Those are just some of the areas you can work on to be a better manager to your staff, so make sure you are thinking of these and you should find it really makes a difference.
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