As a business owner do you ever think about how good your team are? Would you consider them to be :
- Excellent at what they do.
- An asset to your business.
- Consistently meeting or exceeding goals and targets.
- Providing excellent customer service.
- Good timekeepers – always on time for work or meetings.
- Great team players.
OR
- Are they just about scraping by?
- You worry about them dealing with clients.
- They miss deadlines and targets.
- You have had complaints.
- They are often late or absent.
- They do what is needed to get by but never go the extra mile?
Your employees are often acting on your behalf and are the face of your Company. If you are not completely happy with how they are performing what, if anything, have you done about it and more to the point what can you do?
All of the above are performance issues. Do you monitor performance, do you have measures in place for goals and monitoring service? If not, these are things you may wish to consider.
Do you have regular meetings with your staff to discuss performance and attitude? What are the outcomes of these meetings? Do you keep written records of any conversations? Are there any consequences, that are explained to the employee, if things do not get any better? If someone wasn’t doing well would you know what to do and how to go about it?
If things got so bad, you could just dismiss them, right?
Well actually no. You would need to follow a process, manage their performance, set goals, have regular updates, potentially put them on a Performance Improvement Plan. Give them a chance to improve and the support to do so.
On the converse side, what do you do if someone is ticking all the right boxes, a real asset to your company, you don’t know what you would do without them? If you don’t tell them how are they ever going to know? Studies have shown that often what staff want (sometimes more so than a pay increase), is praise and recognition of good work or performance and when they don’t get that from managers it makes them feel demotivated and unappreciated which in turn can reflect on their future performance and willingness to go the extra mile.
Asking your top performers and advocates what they would like as a thank you is the first step to a happy team member!
If any or even all of the above are ringing some bells, now might be the time to call us at DOHR. We can offer support, guidelines and templates that will help you manage your team to either improve or to help you manage them out.
