As a business owner, you haven’t got enough time on your hands to be constantly checking in with your workforce. You’re busy enough on a day-to-day basis without having to worry about keeping your employees on the straight and narrow when it comes to their work, which is why you must have a strong and dedicated management team in place.
These professionals will be charged with overseeing the productivity levels of your staff members, subsequently allowing you to focus on other pressing tasks such as schmoozing clients and sealing deals.
To ensure that your management team help rather than hinder you in your attempt to create an efficient workforce, you must optimize their workflow. To find out how this can be achieved, be sure to read on.
Empower them with technology
Your management workforce might be comprised of hard-working, talented, and productive individuals. This does not, however, necessarily going to result in them working in a highly optimized fashion daily. Your managers are only human, which means that they will let their emotions get the better of them and subsequently make mistakes from time to time.
If your management team is to operate in a targeted and effective manner no matter what situations they face in your workspace, you need to empower them with technology. More to the point, you need to empower them with an expert project management software solution. With this tech tool at hand, you will find it easier to stay on top of their ever-changing to-do list, they’ll be able to share documents, they’ll have a tighter grip on the budgets that they have to work with, and they will be able to enjoy increased flexibility with regards to when and how they communicate with the teams that they manage.
Give them a license to delegate and allocate
Do you want your management team to run a tight ship in your absence? If so, you need to give them a license to delegate tasks and allocate resources as and when they see fit.
So long as they don’t let their newfound power go to their head, providing your managers with this type of responsibility will give them more authority in the workplace and, therefore, help them keep your workforce on the straight and narrow when you are otherwise engaged.
What’s most, providing them with more power in this instance, will showcase just how you trust them. In turn, this will make them want to work harder for you going forward to gain even more responsibility (and subsequently make their CV look even better) going forward
Provide them with ongoing education
Should any of your managers suffer from a perceived skill-gap, don’t be too quick to demote them. Instead, show some faith in them by paying for them to attend training sessions that are designed to improve their leadership, communication, and decision-making abilities.
Providing your managers with ongoing education will not only help them to bridge their skill-gap, but it will also prove to them that you value their presence in your workspace.
Here are just a few of the training options that your management staff has available to them:
Seminars — 1-2 days long
Online courses — self-paced but will generally take six months to complete
Undergraduate degrees — associate degrees will take 1-2 years to complete, bachelor’s program will generally last for 3-4
Graduate degrees — depending on level (master’s/doctorate), these courses can take anywhere between 1 and 5 years to complete
Make sure your managers take breaks
No matter how experienced or professional your management staff might be, there will be times where their productivity levels drop. Again, they’re only human!
Unfortunately, these momentary lapses in concentration could end up having a massive ongoing impact on the rest of your workforce. If a particularly unmotivated staff member sees their line manager losing focus for a minute or two, they may feel inclined to follow suit.
This could then have a snowball effect where several your employees start to lose concentration and, ultimately, the manager in question has to waste their time and effort on getting their team back on the straight and narrow.
To ensure that momentary lapses in focus and productivity don’t have a widespread negative impact on the rest of your workforce, you need to cut them out at the source. This can be one by ensuring that your management takes breaks. For more information on why breaks are so important in the world of work, be sure to check out this article on the matter.
Related Posts
- 5 Ways To Make Your Small Business Earth-Friendly – As a business, you’ve got corporate social responsibility. This means a responsibility to the society…
- Business Insurance Basics Most Small Business Owners Don’t Know – Insurance often seems like a complicated topic, especially for a new business owner. However, at…
- Review of Fotor.com for Entrepreneurs and Business Owners – Hello, my entrepreneurial friends. I’m always searching for great tools to help you start and…
