Keeping Your Team In Line Without Being Strict

When most people start their first business, they won’t be making plans for a time when their company is managing a range of employees. With so much work on your plate during these initial stages, things can often get ahead of the plans you’ve made, and this will often result in challenges arising which you simply won’t be ready for. To help you out with this, this post will be exploring the work which goes into keeping a team in line. Ensuring that you stay within your comfort zone, though, this will all be through methods which won’t make you appear to be strict or overbearing.

Company Rules

It’s fairly normal for companies to have blanket rules which apply to everyone which works for them. Not using social media while working, getting into the office on time, and keeping chatter to a minimum are all fair expectations to have of the people working for you. These rules need to apply before anyone joins the company, though. If you fail to achieve this goal, people will feel as though things are being taken away from them, even if what you’re asking for is normal. Along with this, it’s also worth leading by example. People won’t feel inclined to follow the rules if they see the highest person in the company breaking them.

Development Plans

A lot of companies make the mistake of keeping their employees out of the loop when it comes to factors like their performance, with managers and bosses talking about numbers behind closed doors. While this will avoid embarrassment when someone is underperforming, it will also make it impossible for your team to improve. People need to be made aware of their shortcomings if they are going to solve them, rather than being left without any clue as to what they are doing right or wrong in their work. This is a job for a personal development plan, or PDP, and this is something which every company should administer.

The early stages of this process will involve sitting down with your employees on their own to talk about what they think might be right or wrong about their performance at work. Some people will be able to assess their own work very honestly, while others will think they are doing far better or worse than they are actually performing. Once they have given their thoughts, it will be your turn to have your say, and you should assess each of the areas they’ve spoken about as honestly as you can. Having established the areas which are lacking the most in their work, you will be able to start pushing towards finding goals which they can work towards.

This doesn’t stop with giving them some targets to reach for, though, with most people struggling to keep on top of something like this without the right sort of drive. At the same time each month, you should go back to each employee and have a similar conversation with them. This time, though, you will be assessing the progress they’ve made towards reaching their goals. If they haven’t moved forwards, you can start to look at what might be holding them back. Once they have overcome their goals, though, you will have the chance to start looking at new ones for them to reach for.

Rewarding The Good

When you’re trying to keep in control of a team of professionals, the best route to take will rarely involve treating them like children. As a big part of this, being strict and telling people off will usually just make things worse. To overcome this, many of the challenges you will face with your team can be solved with a reward or two. For example, if you’re finding yourself frustrated with people leaving work unfinished, you could start a rule which allows people to leave work early if they’ve completed all of their tasks. Of course, while you don’t want to lose out as a result of this, it shouldn’t cost you too much once your team have gotten used to working harder.

Competition

A lot of companies like to avoid sparking competition between their team members. Being worried that this sort of mentality will be toxic, most businesses will keep the atmosphere in their offices as professional as possible. In reality, though, giving people a goal to reach can often be as simple as showing them what other people are able to achieve. This works particularly well in target driven jobs, as you will be able to compare people’s results directly. In more complicated roles, though, you will have to find different ways to compare you team, using the issues your business has had in the past as the catalyst for this change.

Doses Of Freedom

When you have to work for a very long time without a break, the task which you’re handling will often become boring. Even if it is something you like, it’s always worth having a break from a job, and this applies to your team, too. Websites like Facebook and Instagram have taken the world by storm over the last few years. In an office setting, though, they can be incredibly dangerous, stopping people from doing their work for long stretches. When someone is bored, this is exactly the sort of website they will want to visit, and this makes it worth looking for ways to satisfy this itch while also getting their work done.

Achieving this can often mean having to move away from tradition a little bit, offering your team members more freedom during each of their work days. When doing a task which involves a lot of thinking or repetitive actions, people will usually be at their most productive when they are given 5 minutes or so out of every half an hour to zone out. While people may try to take advantage of this, there are resources like 8 Expert Tips For Handling Time-Off Requests all over the web which can make it far easier to handle this sort of issue.

Proper Training

One of the biggest problems faced by modern work forces is poor training. In a lot of roles, people are expected to go from having no experience to carrying out complicated tasks in a matter of hours, and this is simply too much for some. To overcome this sort of issue, it will be worth putting together a proper training system before you start to hire anyone. This will enable you to get them used to doing their job before they get started. If you want to take this further, it will be worth hiring a professional training company to help you out, as they will have the resources to teach far more effectively than you do.

Along with working hard to give people the right kind of training, it will be essential that you keep this information up to date. Software is always changing, and having people learn about it in their own time will be far too strict. Instead, whenever someone’s job changes, they should be given an induction to make sure that they can work without getting confused. This is particularly important with any sort of technology, as modern devices can be harder to use for some than others, and a good employer always has to consider this.

With all of this in mind, you should be feeling ready to take on the challenge of keeping a modern workplace team in line. This sort of work can be a big challenge when you’re first getting started, with most people lacking the experience which is required when building a team.