As a supervisor or manager, employee performance is never far from your mind. Here are five ways to improve the performance of your employees.
#1 The Big Picture
Your company has a clear vision of where it wants to be in 5, 10, even perhaps 20 years, but what about your employees? Communicating the company vision is key in getting emotional investment from your employees. Ensuring your employees know exactly how their role fits in with the big picture will encourage them to strive they toward common goals.
#2 Push The Right Buttons
Motivation is an easy concept but a difficult action point. Each employee will have their own motivation trigger. Your job as a leader is to find out how to improve employee engagement with your staff to ensure their motivation needs are met. For some, this could be a financial incentive, or flexible work arrangements, or a matter of ensuring job satisfaction by encouraging camaraderie and making work a positive place to be.
#3 Tell The Truth…Tactfully
Feedback is not a dirty word. In fact, giving constructive feedback can be the difference between a workforce that flounders and one that strives for excellence. Regular discussion and comments on performance ensure that both you and your employees are working toward common goals, and that any divergence is quickly addressed – saving time, and ensuring that your staff know their work is respected and valued. Positive reinforcement is often more beneficial to morale and improving quality of work over time. As the saying goes, ‘be generous with praise, and selfish with criticism.’
#4 It’s Always The Best Swimmers That Drown
Workload management is essential to performance management. Everyone knows a colleague who has had more on their plate than they can handle. While it’s tempting to thing of overworking employees as a temporary solution to a business problem, it can be very damaging to your workforce in the forms of burnout of a key employee, overall morale and performance drop, absenteeism, and may even be detrimental to your companies reputation, impacting on future recruiting. If workload rises significantly, so should your number of employees.
#5 Keep Your Finger On The Pulse
Arguably the best thing you can do as a leader is to be available as a resource for your staff. Ensuring that your employees feel comfortable to approach you with questions or concerns builds trust, job satisfaction, and can alert you to any potential problem areas early enough to correct or improve. This approach also helps you to identify motivation triggers, as you may discover an employee’s longing for further training, emerging expertise, or leadership attributes that can be developed further to benefit your company. Training companies, such as Axcelerate ( http://axcelerate.com.au/ ), offer a variety of training resources, giving you the confidence that your employees are getting the professional development they need to know their talents and contributions are valued.
What strategies do you think trigger better employee performance?
