To manage employees better means to manage their work efficiency, engagement, and productivity for improved work performance and eventually the value for the company.
Managing employees refers to the way a manager manages, a leader leads, and a company oversees the employees. On the other hand, knowing the employees means learning the views of the employees concerning the organizational affairs and understanding them as individuals better.
Typically, a better way to know and manage employees comprises the following aspects:
Evaluation: Evaluating the way employees are managed so as to find the flows and strengths in this aspect.
Autonomy: Avoid controlling employees at the micro-level and providing them with necessary autonomy.
Awareness: Being aware of how your management style influences others (work and beyond).
Manager management: Making the managers answerable for their own work without interfering with their management style
and the way they manage their teams.
Recognition: Crediting employees for their achievement and contribution along with appreciating the skills they have and what they are capable of achieving in the future.
Favorable work environment: A work environment that is beneficial for the employees’ creativity, engagement, and productivity levels.
We discuss the aforementioned elements that are essential to knowing and managing employees below:
6 Ways to know and manage the employees better
1. Analyzing the managerial style
It is extremely important that you have a good look at your management style if you want to know and manage your employees better. One of the aspects in this regard requires the managers to learn and understand the role of the people they are managing or going to manage.
When you learn the nature of the jobs of the people around you, it becomes easier to make difficult and tough decisions in adverse business times. You understand which particular decision is going to affect the company and a segment of its employees.
A better elevation of your own management style resides in communicating with the employees. However, this communication should be rather open and honest. The employees should be allowed to convey their thoughts and perceptions. Nevertheless, they should be made confident that their honest opinions will be appreciated. Employees can also be encouraged in this respect.
Bravo can be leveraged the best for the managers to look into how they manage their people. It comes with the feature, Bravo Voice, that encourages the employees to share their views on organizational matters. The employees are made to share their opinions to get rewards from the company, which makes more and more employees shed light on the management style of their managers.
To conclude, understanding how you manage or are managing employees goes a long way in knowing and managing them. Importantly, it leads you to learn your strengths and weaknesses as a manager, which helps you become a better leader.
2. Avoiding micromanaging the employees
One of the ways that can be used to manage your employees better is by avoiding controlling each and every aspect of employees. A better term to explain where managers try to take control of everything that their subordinates do is “mircomanaging.”
Most often than not, managers micromanage their teams with good intentions. But, it often only leads to making employees less confident and, subsequently, doubt their abilities, leading to a decrease in their performance levels. It also leads to employees feeling low worthed within the organization, which reduces employee retention and elevates employee turnover.
Indeed, a leading employment website explains a micromanager as follows:
“A micromanager is a manager who carefully monitors their team members’ work. They usually have good intentions and micromanage only to increase team performance. Their behavioural patterns, however, might have a negative influence on their team’s potential to build their own leadership behaviours.”
The explanation of Indeed also suggests that while managers have all the good intentions behind their micromanagement, it proves to be counterproductive instead of providing any value to the team and, eventually, the company.
Understanding the importance of not controlling the employees at the lowest level recommends the managers avoid practicing it so as to know and manage employees better.
3. Being aware of one’s self
Effective management of teams requires the leader to be mindful of their actions and behaviors. Essentially, managers should try to put themselves in the shoes of the people that they are leading and managing. This way, a manager is able to understand the situation others are in. Also, it makes them perceive the effect of their actions and behaviors on others.
Having a leader better able to judge how they interact with their teams, especially in a social and emotional manner, can help strengthen the relationship between them and the team members. Besides helping establish stronger team relations, it also helps develop a stronger and closely working team.
Being aware of one’s self in regard to the management and supervision of teams can help one learn the areas of highs and lows as a manager. As a result, it allows you to work on the lagged behind aspects. Additionally, it enables making use of different managerial styles in different situations.
An important reason why managers should carefully watch how they interact with their teams is that it leads to the “ripple effect,” which suggests that the influence of your behavior with one team member can leave others with the same taste as well. So, a positive ripple effect would mean a positive effect on the other employees, which started with the first employee. On the contrary, a negative ripple effect is the one that starts with one employee and leaves others with the same impact.
4. Knowing and managing the managers (too)
A very important consideration with respect to knowing and managing the employees is to manage the managers. For an organization, if it wants to know and manage employees better, it is equally important that it keeps a check on its managers and the leaders managing and leading the teams within the company, respectively.
One of the highlighted positive impacts of making your managers go through the same evaluation levels is that it helps avoid the notion of favoritism. In some organizations, there remains a belief that the employees at relatively higher positions, such as managers, and executives, are not as answerable for their contribution to the company as the employees at the middle or lower positions.
While the belief that there exists favoritism within the organization leads to many future conflicts, it also leads to making employees difficult to handle and understand. As a result, it leads to decreased employee performance. However, with the managers being answerable for their own performance, it eliminates such a belief. With it, it becomes easier to manage the workforce, leading to an elevated performance level.
Lastly, managing the managers just as the employees is critical to managing all the employees, but the way a manager manages or a leader leads should not be interfered with. Everyone has their own leading styles, so each style should be accepted until a suitable time so as to see what results from it for the company.
5. Recognizing the employees
Appreciation and acknowledgment is the simplest way to know and manage employees better. It is also one of the simplest ways to achieve it along with the subsequently improved employee performance.
Employee recognition should not be limited or saved for a significant achievement of the employees. In fact, every achievement should be praised irrespective of how large or little.
Moreover, every employee should be credited for their skills even if it does not bring any substantial value to their respective team and the company.
In order for you to know and manage employees better, their areas of strength should be highlighted. In addition to this, what your employees can potentially achieve should also be emphasized. In this way, the employees will not only be made confident of their capabilities but also of what they are capable of achieving.
An important aspect of rewarding employees is that it should match a company’s working culture. For instance, if a company’s culture is based on respecting the employees and empowering the employee growth, financial support for acquiring further education or a wellness incentive is likely to be given as a reward.
A long-established belief regarding rewarding the employees is that only expensive or high-monetary rewards to employees can help make employee recognition effective. However, it is not entirely true. While rewards that provide high economic value to the employees are always lucrative, the ones that are non-monetary based and include little to no expense can also be effective.
Today, companies are increasingly making use of non-financial means to recognize and reward their employees. A simple thank you, special mentions during official meetings, social media recognition, etc., are all means of non-financial recognition and can be equally beneficial as the financial rewards.
While appreciating employees for their talent and contributions provides value in managing and knowing them, it also goes a long way in maximizing their presence as a workforce. Most importantly, it can also help you take the productivity levels of your employees.
The productivity and engagement of your employees are most likely to be positively affected if you are able to show what they achieved over a specific period. Based on their progress, they will either receive appreciation or not. However, in both cases, there is a high probability of their performance being improved.
In a nutshell, whatever the way you choose to recognize your employees and whatever means you opt for to reward them, appreciating your employees helps you know and manage employees better. So, employee recognition and rewards are important in this respect.
6. Enjoyable workplace and positive work culture
The success of the managers and leaders is largely determined by the workplace environment of a company. Managing and knowing the employees thrives in a positive and rather enjoyable workplace.
The fun factor is important for a productive work environment. An employee spends more time in the office and with their peers than they do at home and with their family.
When employees spend a considerable portion of their day at the workplace, it is natural for the employees and their work to be affected by the environment that it has to offer. For this reason, an organization should try that its work environment is not boring but pleasant, so the creativity and, subsequently, productivity and engagement levels of the employees remain to the desired or acceptable levels.
To know and manage employees better, a positive work culture holds the utmost importance. A workplace that harms the mental health of the employees is not only harmful to the employee’s well-being, but it has far-reaching consequences. Most importantly, it hurts the brand of the company, which makes it unable to hire suitable candidates, thus putting its very existence at stake.
Windup
To manage employees better requires a company to perform some practices. From a pleasant workplace and employee management to evaluation and awareness of one’s own management style are some of the ways a company can know and manage employees better.
For a company to know its employees, it’s important that it gives them the necessary voice so they can share their opinions/ thoughts/ concerns. Bravo helps you give your employees a voice through its Bravo voice feature.
Bravo also provides a great utility for the organizations to manage employees better. You can book a demo to learn the practicality of Bravo to know and manage employees better.
