Employee Management: Are your employees in the right roles?

Finding your employees

First you need to find them which means using one or several methods to attract the best candidates.

Advertising positions

Spread your net as wide as possible when looking for employees. An advert at the local job centre will not result in a flood of applications and the ideal employee may be someone with a job already but looking for a better one. Do a deal with a chain of local newspapers or a job site which covers your area or industry fairly well, to put an advert in the jobs section of all their publications and consider advertising online via your website, job boards and social media channels such as LinkedIn. Employ people you like and who your team will like. You are going to spend a lot of time together and a good atmosphere will help productivity.

Interviews

Ensure you have a structured way of interviewing people. There is no point finding out that someone can’t do the job once they have been with you for a month. Build up a list of questions that you use in interviews and continually develop and improve it.

Internal Promotion

Promote from within whenever you can. If someone can do the job, give them the chance. You know what you are getting and it sends out a message to everyone else that those who work hard will be rewarded. Besides, almost two-thirds of appointments to jobs paying over £20,000 do not work.

Don’t employ your best mate

Good friendships rarely translate into good working relationships and friendships can often be ruined.

Ensuring your staff are in the right roles

Once you have got the right people in your team, the trick is to make sure they are in the right roles.

Motivation

Find out what motivates people. If it’s just money (and very few people are motivated purely by this) then bonuses and financial targets are a must. If it’s working in a nice environment, spend some money making it nice. Not everyone is motivated by the same things you are.

Don’t expect staff to be like yourself

They are not you and they never will be. Business owners can get frustrated trying to make employees into miniature versions of themselves and expecting them to think through problems in the same way that they would. It’s not going to happen and it’s no bad thing. A good business needs a variety of personalities to be able to develop.

Job descriptions

Give people job descriptions but don’t let them hide behind them. Everyone needs to know what their responsibilities are (in writing) but make everyone aware that at times they will have to roll up their sleeves and help colleagues that are struggling or solve problems that were not of their making.

Ensure systems are in place

Continually work on your systems so that your best people can get on with making a difference and are not always running around correcting errors.

Delegate

If you let everyone rely on you, you will never get the best from your team.

Learn from mistakes

Make sure that there is a discussion process to help people learn from mistakes but do not allow your business to develop a blame culture

Play to people’s strengths

Some people are good at organisation but poor at dealing with customers. Allow them the freedom to organise certain sections of the business and leave the face-to-face stuff to those that are good at it.

For advice on employment issues contact a member of our team on (01474) 853856.