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In this article, you’ll read about 5 most common employee management myths and find out if there’s any truth behind them. You’ll also learn 5 great tips on how to better manage your employees.
For a business to run successfully, it’s crucial for employers to have the skill of effective employee management. After all, it is employees who are the source of power in the organization, accelerating business growth on a daily basis. Hardworking and productive employees increase the chances of business success while lazy and unhappy employees inevitably damage companies one way or another.
Managing employees isn’t the easiest task, and managers need to find a delicate balance between being micromanaging control freaks and lenient softies.
In today’s article, we’ll take a look at some of the most common myths around the concept of employee management and share with you best tips to manage your employees effectively.
What Is Employee Management?
Before we take a deep dive into the world of efficient management of employees, it’s important to understand the basics. In its essence, employee management is comprised of several important aspects:
- Recruitment – hiring the ideal candidate with the required skills for a specific job
- Monitoring – getting insights into employee performance on the regular basis (for example, with the help of great employee monitoring software)
- Collaboration – Noticing how your employees interact and collaborate with each other every day
- Reward – Stimulating high-achieving employees for performing well and reaching goals
- Discipline – Ensuring your employees act in accordance with internal workplace policies.
Trust us when we say that employee management, when done right, pays off. Productive employees successfully carry out their duties, which leads to happier clients, increased customer loyalty, and higher profits for the business.
When your employees are demotivated and therefore unproductive, the turnover rate will be high and you’ll have to spend extra costs on hiring. And it’s rather unpleasant to waste your time and money on recruiting and onboarding new hires only for them to leave in no time and force you to start the process all over again. And that’s exactly where efficient managing of employees comes into play.
What Are the Benefits of Efficient Employee Management?
Skillful employee management offers numerous benefits that contribute to both employee and organizational success:
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Improved Productivity and Efficiency
Proper employee management helps everyone stay in the loop, with employees knowing exactly what’s expected of them and employers being aware exactly how efforts of specialists help your business grow.
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Increased Employee Engagement
Employee recognition and development opportunities boost satisfaction, and happy employees are more motivated and invested in their work, with better focus and improved efficiency.
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Reduced Employee Turnover
Best employee management practices help reduce turnover, retaining talent and saving you the cost of recruiting and training new staff.
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Better Conflict Resolution
Effective employee management deals with conflicts in a timely and fair way, ensuring open and transparent communication, which helps resolve issues more quickly, minimize disruptions and ensure a healthy work environment.
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Improved Compliance
Good employee management ensures adherence to labor laws and other regulations, including employee monitoring laws, thus minimizing legal issues and contributing to a safe workplace with non-discriminatory practices.
5 Common Employee Management Myths Debunked
Myth 1 – Employee Performance Management Equals Total Control
The very purpose of employee management is to keep track of their work activity and productivity levels. In doing so, it actually minimizes micromanaging and constant supervision. Data-driven reports generated with the help of non-invasive background monitoring help managers clearly see all the stats they need to make just and unbiased decisions. This way, their need to pepper employees with questions related to project performance diminishes.
Moreover, most technological employee management solutions come equipped with a time tracking feature that provides them with better understanding of employees’ work time distribution.
So rather than being means of excessive control, smart employee management helps managers get better visibility of employee work activity and project progress.
Myth 2 – Managing Employee Work Lowers Employee Productivity
Competent management of employees can actually act as a motivating factor that enhances their engagement, improves performance, and boosts employee productivity as a result.
More advanced employee productivity management tools even offer self-monitoring features so that employees can see their work progress themselves, which gives them a sense of accountability, boosting motivation to be even more productive and committed to their jobs.
Myth 3 – Remote Employee Managing Means My Employer Doesn’t Trust Me
While excessive management practices might seem like a sign of distrust, most organizations actually introduce them from the place of needing to organize workflows in accordance with their capacity.
Moreover, the more efficient management techniques are, the better insights managers gain into the team’s activities, work habits and needs. They can easily see peak performance hours and organize employee workload accordingly. At any point, they can also take note if the employees need additional training.
Myth 4 – Employee Task Management Only Benefits Employers
Proper managing of workforce benefits both employers and employees, especially when it comes to projects where performance management and workflow optimization are concerned.
It’s so much more than a means of micromanaging employees. Task management software closes the information gap and provides managers with insights into employees’ skills and efficiency that would otherwise be complicated to obtain.
Myth 5 – Employee Work Management Damages Employee Autonomy
Arguably, one of the most prevalent fears in terms of employee management is that it kills autonomy, which is as far from the truth as one can get. Work management shouldn’t be associated with feelings of restriction for employees. Instead, emphasis should be placed on their overall productivity. By focusing on results, managers can let their employees work autonomously (granted they still use monitoring tools to check project progress and ensure company goals are accomplished).
What’s more, employee management tools provide employees with access to data gathered. This way, employees can see how much time they spend on tasks and projects, check their app & website usage, spot their own biggest workplace distractions and figure out their real productivity levels, all of which keeps them accountable.
5 Tips on How to Manage Employees Better
Tip 1. Set Clear Goals
Set goals for your business and figure out the output you need from your employees to help reach these goals. Articulate your expectations to them and the things they need to do to get there. Remember to set a deadline. The more specific you are with setting goals and communicating them to your employees, the more developed their skills will be and the more motivated they will feel. Besides, it’s impossible for employees to meet the expectations they aren’t aware of.
Tip 2. Foster Open Communication
Effective managers communicate with their employees openly to gain their trust and respect. Having a platform for your employees to share their ideas and complaints without being judged could be a great idea. It would be a wise move on managers’ part to understand the problems of employees and see things from their viewpoint. Open communication will help employees feel comfortable in the workplace.
Tip 3. Encourage Employees to Share Their Opinions
It is your responsibility as an employer to create a safe working environment where employees will feel comfortable to voice their opinions. This way, workers will feel motivated to improve their performance. No one should be shut down from voicing their opinions even when you don’t agree with them. Every thought and opinion is important. Your employees need to feel like they’ve been heard.
Tip 4. Measure Employee Performance on a Regular Basis
This is one of the hardest things to do in the workplace since most employees don’t like being checked up on regularly. When you measure employee performance, you should avoid micromanagement and excessive negative feedback. It’s also important to communicate to your employees that you trust them to perform well and it’s more a way for you to keep track of everything happening in the company.
Tip 5. Use Dedicated Employee Management Software
Software for workforce management can help you automate various processes, from time tracking to project management. Digital monitoring tools eliminate manual errors, streamline business processes, and promote accountability and transparency in the workplace. These solutions help managers track working hours, monitor workload distribution, check employee goals, collect feedback, and use performance metrics to make unbiased business decisions.
Improve Your Employee Management with Kickidler
Combining the best features of multiple employee management tools we’ve covered above, Kickidler software helps streamline employee management with a wide variety of real-time employee monitoring, time tracking, and project management features that offer actionable insights into team growth.
So how exactly can Kickidler help in managing staff?
Our cutting-edge solution helps digitize essential management processes like time tracking, workload distribution, and performance evaluation.
Using it, you can:
- Manage employee timesheets in real time
- Conduct performance evaluations
- Analyze data trends using integrated reporting tools
- Assign tasks and track their completion
- Prevent insider threats with the help of notifications on violations
