Every organization needs to have specific strategies on how to maintain productivity. This can be doing things like getting new technology, changing strategy, and even hiring new employees that are more aligned with your expectations. The latter can be a challenge as different people need different situations in order to be their most productive. Let’s take a look at how to establish and communicate your expectations for your business.
Clearly Communicate Your Vision
In order to get the most out of any relationship there has to be clear communication. In the employee/employer relationship there is no better way than to have clear expectations. After all, if an employee is unsure what is expected of them, they could waste time and effort just trying to identify what comes next.
Almost every employee hates to be micromanaged and will do what they can to avoid having this become part of their daily work life. By setting clearly communicated objectives and expectations, it provides workers all of the information they need to take control of their work lives. It also allows you to set measurable goals for your people to reach and allows you to easily determine how they are performing. If you routinely review objectives, you can set a streamlined guideline for your entire staff; moving your work forward more effectively.
Be Upfront
When onboarding new employees, there is a tendency to try and get them up to speed by utilizing your more experienced employees as a type of mentor or to let your managers handle their progress until they are up to speed. Regardless of what type of strategy you use, you will want to set your expectations early. Obviously, you may not know exactly what you have in that particular employee, but understanding your business and what need you hired a new employee for will allow you to effectively communicate exactly what the job demands from day one.
This starts even before you make a hire. You should have an accurate job description that serves as a baseline of trust between you and an applicant. Once you make a hire, you should have a discussion that centers on your workplace culture, the way your business sets goals, how you measure results, and all the expectations of them when they work for you, be it from an office or as a remote employee. The faster a new employee can identify how an organization works and where they fit, the more comfortable they will get, and the better work they will produce.
Make Accountability Important
Every employee works best when they feel empowered. So, you and your management team should begin to outline goals that can make this a reality. This typically means fielding input from your staff about how to achieve departmental goals more effectively, how to allocate resources more efficiently, and allow for professional development. Unfortunately, a lot of businesses put demands on their workforce that are just too unrealistic, and they get frustrated workers.
One way to keep this from happening is to set achievable goals and then hold your employees accountable for reaching them. As they grow more confident and capable, you can begin to strategize how to keep them engaged with their own professional success. The fact is that the more employees working at reaching goals they can reach, the better results your business is going to achieve.
Stay In the Loop
Getting your employees to meet expectations and begin to take accountability for their own personal workplace performance is a huge benefit to any business. Unfortunately, many employees need more than just a little space to grow into their position. They also need to have the notion that they are getting the consideration they deserve.
One great way to engage your employees is to provide meaningful and relevant feedback that takes their professional development seriously. Once at a job for a while, some people will continue an upward trend of performance, but many will stagnate. By staying in the loop and providing the leadership any good team requires, your employees will be more engaged and continue to grow into their roles in your company.
Make Your Expectations Measurable
Nowadays, you can get data on just about anything in business, this includes all types of metrics for individual employee performance. By setting organizational goals that can be broken down into parts and then measured, it can give you a great picture of individual, team, and department performance. This data can help you know where to fit certain people within your organization, whether that means a promotion, reassignment, or unfortunately in some cases, termination.
Technology can massively help you and your management team break down all the data into easy to understand reports and help make the decisions that can help your business grow and prosper. The IT professionals at North Central Technologies can help you use technology to capture the data your business generates and turn it into actionable knowledge that can help you get the most out of any of your investments. If you’d like to learn more, give us a call today at 978-798-6805.
