When you own a business with any more than a handful of employees, the supervision of each individual member of staff can be difficult. However, the importance of achieving a level of supervision cannot be underestimated. Not only do you need to check employee progress to ensure everyone is working as productively as possible, but contacting and discussing work with employees is one of the best ways of maintaining a strong employee-employer relationship.
It is also worth noting that the monitoring of, and direct contact with, employees should always be beneficial. Monitoring for the sake of monitoring can make employees feel vulnerable and, in extreme cases, as if they cannot be trusted. In order to find a balance between ensuring your employees feel trusted, while still ensuring that performance standards are upheld, there are three phases you should integrate for each individual member of your workforce.
Daily
Daily supervision should be hands-off; you don’t want employees to feel like you are hanging on their shoulders, monitoring everything that they do. As a result, automating the daily supervision with the likes of Bluescreen.se/workcloud is usually the best option. This allows you to track employee productivity, attention, and efficiency, but without having to constantly monitor every movement they make in person.
As we will discuss, some employees may need more supervision, while others will have displayed a performance record that merits a simpler approach. You will ascertain which of these is applicable to each individual over the next two phases of supervision and contact.
Monthly
Monthly supervision should focus on goals; both the evaluation of goals over the last 28 days, and setting goals for the future. Goal setting provides a vital metric by which to measure an employee’s overall workrate; you can read more about setting realistic goals at Paychex.com/articles/.
If you run a large organization, speaking to each individual staff member once per month is unlikely to be feasible. However, you should encourage your management team to conduct monthly contact sessions with employees, from which they can then file succinct reports back to you.
If problems are identified during a monthly review, then enhanced daily supervision should be implemented until improvements are achieved. Conversely, if an employee is meeting, or even exceeding, expectations then a monthly review should identify this, allowing you to provide appropriate reward.
Annual
Finally, annual supervision is a chance to really dig into facts on a long-term basis. This is where you will evaluate not only goals achieved and overall productivity, but also take the chance to sit with each employee and discuss their performance, their place in the workforce, and their overall happiness. In many ways, an annual review is supervision from afar; a chance to collect together a broad picture of an employee’s overall performance.
An annual review should, wherever possible, always be conducted by you personally. It should also seek to be honest, but not a dealbreaker; annual reviews should not be used to decide an individual’s future employment. Instead, they are an opportunity to identify any areas where an employee may need extra support – which you can integrate into daily supervision – and where they are performing well.
In conclusion
By undertaking the three distinct types of supervision above, you should always be able to achieve a clear picture of your employees, their happiness, and their overall performance in the role. If you conduct this process for every member of staff, your business should benefit from an engaged, productive workforce who feel supervision is useful, and encourages them to work to the best of their abilities.
