As a business owner or manager, you may think that the current labor market will keep your employees working their hardest and giving their best. It won’t. In good times and bad, people respond to the same core messages. And even if you’re not concerned about the culture you create in your workplace, know that the economy will eventually get better, competitive opportunities for your employees will open up and, if you haven’t already put your house in order when it does, they will throw you over as soon as they can.
Today let’s combine two hot trends in blog posts: one is the “10 ways to….” post and the other is the “sustainability” related post. Many of the latter take the form of advising us how to stop wasting something so that’s what we’ll do too. Usually “waste” is applied to resources such as food and paper; because we write for the work place, our list is about people. Our post today is dedicated to managers, business owners, policy writers and anyone whose actions affect the culture at work. So, in no particular order:
34 Ways To Stop Wasting Your Employees
(Management actions that cause employees to stop giving their best, to resign before you want them to and otherwise to stop caring).
- Believe that your employees want to do a good job
- Treat them like adults
- Hold them responsible for their behavior and their words
- Take responsibility for your actions and words
- Give them realistic expectations and then hold them responsible for fulfilling them
- Listen carefully
- Assign them to jobs that fit their skills and interests
- Pay them fairly but understand that money doesn’t make up for other shortcomings
- Speak honestly
- Make sure that your actions and your words line up
- Be transparent about your motives
- Understand that “corporate culture” derives organically from the sum total of management’s actions and not at all on what they say
- Managers should manage. Everyone is a manager of something
- Leaders should lead. Everyone can be a leader in some way
- Praise in public, criticize in private
- Give praise as soon as it’s due, only when it is due, and in proportion to what you are praising
- Don’t try to measure what can’t be measured
- Obey employment laws
- Go beyond mere compliance
- Treat your customers and your suppliers right
- Exercise restraint in the use of your power
- Support your employees’ professional growth
- Support your employees’ growth as human beings
- Focus more on what they are good at and like to do and less on trying to fix what they’re not so good at
- Take appropriate risks
- Build a culture where mistakes are accepted
- Accept responsibility for your own mistakes
- Regardless of what HR says, each person is different and needs to be managed differently
- “Performance management” is more than filling out a review form once a year; do it every day
- Don’t pretend that you know things you don’t know
- Understand that authority is granted to you because of your actions and not by your title
- See the forest and the trees and know how to tell the difference
- Fix what’s broken
- Only fix what’s broken
I’m sure that there are more but if you master these you will have created a workplace culture that people will want to commit to. What more could you want?
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Right on! Love the sustainability angle; too often organizations concern themselves with conserving capital & behaving responsibly with natural resources, but give very little thought to caring for their most valuable resource: their people. And in the process, allow a lot of creativity, initiative, and other valuable human contributions to be frittered away, to dry up, to end up on the trash heap (or on someone else’s payroll). This is a refreshing view of the broader picture: all the parts that go into creating an environment where people can and do give the best they’ve got to their employers.