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SOME KEY EMPLOYEE MANAGEMENT CAVEATS

There are several points that may assist you in general employee management:

1.) Employees should know the mission of your company. This can be covered in new employee orientation, but should be reinforced on a periodic basis.

2.) Employees should know the goals of the company. These tend to be shorter-term in nature — annual or quarterly goals on sales, feed tonnage or grain throughput. Knowing the company’s goals assists with developing a team spirit and esprit de corps.

3.) Garnering employee input. This does help promote employee “buy-in” and thus, employees feel their ideas matter when working on setting your firm’s goals and policies. Seek their input when and where appropriate.

4.) Employees also need to know their job matters to your company. Periodically thanking individual employees for working for you and offering praise for jobs well done and genuinely letting them know you appreciate their effort generates a lot of goodwill. Our advice is to praise lavishly, criticize sparingly — all done appropriately and sincerely.

5.) Giving constant feedback. We have touched on employee evaluations in this column previously (FEED & GRAIN: April/May, 2006 — “Warning! Employee Evaluations Approaching”). However, the focus of that and other human resource approaches focus on the “official” employee evaluation. Informal feedback can be gentle, persuasive and important. There is a fine line between this and the “micromanaging” approach we mentioned previously — and you have to find the “sweet” spot — easy to say, but tougher to do. The notion of coaching, especially if you have good people, is a useful perspective. Guiding, supporting, encouraging, teaching, practicing, setting expectations, etc. are all elements of a successful coach and such a perspective can be a good guide to your own management activities.

6.) “What’s in it for me (your employee)?” We understand that motivating and managing employees is as much an art as a science but both aspects can be learned. Good managers help employees to understand the company’s mission and goals as stated above, but also by finding that appropriate mix of goals shared by both the company and your employee.