How to Efficiently Manage Employees as a Small Business Owner

Employee management is a crucial component of a thriving business. This can significantly affect the engagement levels of your agents, managers, supervisors, operations staff and administrative personnel as they go about their day-to-day duties for your organization. Recent studies indicate that around 70% of all American employees in various industries are actively feeling disengaged from their duties and responsibilities at the workplace.

Another study indicates that 58% of American managers are untrained in corporate management. Don’t allow your business to be part of this unfortunate statistic. This is among the primary reasons why you should train your staff and formulate strategic ways to manage your back and front end workflow systems. You’re recommended to do this for each department of your business. Seamless integration between the different units of your organization also needs to be done. Here are 5 of the most cost-effective tactics to pull this off:

5 of the Best Employee Management Strategies for Small Business Owners

1. Set Clear, Attainable Goals for Your Employees

It’s much faster and more cost-effective for employees to clearly know their goals while being trained in completing their duties and responsibilities. This allows them to formulate custom strategies, techniques, and tactics that are aligned to their expertise, knowledge, skills, and training. They’ll also be able to determine the most efficient ways to collaborate with their co-workers across the various departments of your business.

Employees who don’t know how and why they need to complete their tasks and obligations for your organization tend to be confused most of the time while doing their day-to-day activities at your business. They’re also hesitant in bringing forth new ideas that could potentially improve your workflow systems and processes. This is among the main reasons why they tend to be inefficient and seem to take more time in fulfilling their duties and responsibilities.

Set annual, quarterly and monthly themes for the different departments of your business. Each of these should have clearly laid out long term goals and short term objectives for each employee. Also, optimize the commensurate rewards and incentives that employees will receive once they achieve your desired results. Each team and department should also be responsible for hitting these goals and objectives. This can inspire and motivate them to work and collaborate with their co-workers in more efficient ways.

2. Keep Communication Lines Open Between Your Teams & Departments

This employee management strategy enables you to know the exact things that are currently happening within your organization. You’ll be able to come up with much better proactive ways to troubleshoot issues and also to further tweak systems that are working really well at the moment. This also allows you to save time, money and other valuable resources. That’s because you’ll be able to pinpoint things that are just wasting the time, energy and resources of your business. You’ll then be able to drop these things as fast as possible, thereby preventing much bigger problems.

You’ll also be able to build up the trust and confidence of your employees in their capabilities when you do this. That’s because many of them are likely to feel that their contributions are valuable for the success of your organization. They’ll also feel more obligated to let their superiors and co-workers know their ideas, issues, and suggestions. This can considerably improve their productivity and work efficiency.

3. Train Your Employees in Developing Their Independent Decision-Making Abilities

Micromanaging is never an ideal employee management tactic. Employees are likely to feel the need to constantly ask their superiors about the best ways they can tackle their duties and responsibilities. Many of them are also likely to do this when troubleshooting certain problems they encounter from time to time.

This wastes the time, energy and resources of your managerial staff, team leaders and executives. They should be left to focus on their own duties and obligations for your business. This way, they’ll be able to come up with innovative ideas that can significantly improve the bottom-line results of your organizational activities and customer-facing campaigns.

Doing this can also inspire and motivate your employees to become more productive partners of your business. They’ll feel the value of their work as they go about their day-to-day activities. Your goals and objectives will become shared interests between the different departments and teams of your organization.

4. Regularly Facilitate Team Building Exercises & Activities for Your Employees

Developing a unique culture within your organization tends to make more employees stay and become loyal partners of your business. That’s because many of them are likely to enjoy their stay at your workplace as they do their tasks on a daily basis. So promote the personal development and growth of your employees as they spend time in your business. You can do this by setting up game and breakout rooms among other relaxing environments and activities within your workplace.

You can also conduct team building exercises from time to time. This can promote friendships and support collaboration activities between your employees and departments. This can also serve as their vacations from their work-related obligations.

5. Use Employee Management Tools & Business Productivity Applications

The core of any business has always been its people, processes and technologies. Covered earlier are people and process development techniques. Now we’ll talk about using the right technologies to supplement the capabilities of your employees. These tools can also augment the strategies they use to complete their daily tasks, which can, in turn, improve the productivity of your business as a whole.

Some of the most widely used employee management applications include Wunderlist, Zapier, IFTTT, Slack, and Trello. These can allow your executive, administrative, technical, managerial and back office support resources to delegate tasks to your production personnel and quality assurance staff in more efficient ways. They’ll also be able to quickly and conveniently monitor the status, work output and questions or issues of your employees and departments in real time.

Email and CRM (customer relationship management) tools can also make it simpler and easier for your sales and marketing staff to monitor their tasks and output. They’ll be able to strategically follow up with the ideal prospects of your business that have already shown some interest in your products and services. This can also generate repeat sales from your existing customers as you use these applications to improve your customer retention programs.

Social media management tools, video and audio conference platforms can also work wonders for your employee management, sales, and marketing campaign monitoring targets. These are especially helpful when you have teams of mobile agents and remote workers across a variety of local areas and countries all around the world.

So keep these 5 employee management strategies in mind as you develop your business processes. This list can help you pinpoint the exact problem areas and bottlenecks of your workflow systems that are limiting the potential of your organization for achieving your goals and objectives. You’ll then be able to customize and align these tactics to best suit the current situation of your company. This can then help you save more time, energy and resources, all while you optimize your business for hitting your desired bottom-line results this year and beyond.