Employee management is a broad term that encompasses every aspect of managing, developing, and interacting with your employees. The aim is to give your team members every tool and advantage necessary to help them achieve their personal goals so that your company reaches its corporate objectives.
When you understand how to manage employees in a small business, your employees become more efficient, engaged, loyal, and supportive of the company and their work. As such, your company can expect increased employee satisfaction, engagement, retention, and overall cost savings.
6 Key Areas of Employee Management
Employee management can be broken down into six key areas: hiring, measuring, interacting, developing, rewarding, and disciplining.
Effective employee management will require adherence to all six areas, as each builds on the next. A misstep in any one area could snowball.
Employee Management Tools
Employment management is a core component of your company’s performance management system. This includes using tools to help you effectively manage your team to ensure maximum efficiency.
Employee management software will help improve workforce productivity, identify ways to engage and retain talent, and alleviate administrative burdens for HR professionals. Check out our roundup of the best employee management software or click through the tabs below for specific tools that help with various aspects of employee management.
Tips on How to Manage Employees
Employee management is a constantly evolving process. However certain constants remain part of a solid foundation of effective employee management.
Communicate Clearly & Often
Never shut employees out. Sure, they may not need to know the intricacies of the company budget, but as it relates to their daily duties, make sure they see why their piece of the puzzle is important.
The best way to do this is to keep open lines of communication. This applies whether you are working in the same office and speaking face to face or if you have a remote-first company and communicate via other means. Your employees will thank you by being more loyal, engaged, and efficient.
Don’t Micromanage
This is hard for many managers and small business owners to hear. Study after study consistently shows that when employees are given the tools to do their jobs and then trusted to do so, they perform at higher levels and better efficiency. Micromanaging employees has the opposite effect.
When you hire an employee, you must trust them to do the job. While you should train and guide them on the steps to take to accomplish the job, you should also believe that they can determine the individual steps as needed. If you don’t trust them to do the job, they may be the wrong employee.
Micromanagement is not avoiding feedback altogether. Rather, it is allowing employees to do the job you hired them to do. Check out our guide to the top people management skills managers should have for more advice.
Give Fair Feedback
Providing both positive and negative feedback to employees is part of your job. It may not be your favorite, but it is still a crucial component of employee management.
With every employee, be fair. If, for example, you are discussing an employee’s repeated tardiness, mention that it violates your company attendance policy to be late. Also, ask if there’s anything you can do to help. Maybe they were having car issues or had a sick child—it is possible that they have a perfectly good reason for their tardiness and, by being fair to them, you demonstrate your flexibility.
Understand Legal Issues
Managers are on the front lines to ensure a company adheres to state and federal labor laws and must understand how to follow them. Otherwise, your business could face serious legal consequences.
You cannot discriminate against employees based on:
- Race
- Color
- Religion
- Sex
- National origin
- Age
- Immigration status
- Genetic information
- Disability
If you are disciplining employees who fall into one of the above-protected classes but other poor-performing employees are not receiving the same treatment, you could open yourself up to legal liability for workplace discrimination.
You must take care to ensure that you treat each employee fairly and equally. That’s why it is in your best interest to have clear employee management policies and procedures in place for you to follow each time. This can help you avoid legal scrutiny and claims of workplace discrimination.
Above all, remember that what you do for or to one employee, you must do for or to all. Have a policy and rigorously stick to it.
Employee Management Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
The best way to handle an employee with a bad attitude is to keep consistency. Encourage the employee by interacting with them and offering rewards for a job well done. Additionally, try to get to the root of the issue and see where you can help the employee overcome any obstacles.
Increasing employee engagement starts with employee management. By being actively involved with the success of your employees, you show them that they are a valued part of your company. This will automatically result in increased employee engagement.
Using employee management tools to attract and manage talent will allow you to spend more time supporting your workforce. As a result, your employees will be more productive.
Bottom Line
Managing employees is a stressful job. You’re trying to motivate your employees to get the work done efficiently and accurately while also managing their expectations. No manager or company has mastered this process, so don’t be too hard on yourself.
Make sure that you are doing everything you can to build loyalty and trust with your employees by communicating openly and clearly with them. The best managers are more like coaches, providing both positive and constructive feedback while developing their employees’ skills by knowing how to manage employees effectively.
