Why do you need to care for your employees?
Why do you need to care for your employees, just as much as your customers?
As we learn to live after COVID, the landscape has changed, most importantly, so has your working conditions. Gone are the days of needing to work in one centralised location, needing to commute for hours and lastly, the 9-5 work routine has become more flexible than ever.
COVID has undoubtedly accelerated digital transformation and encouraged businesses to enable staff members to work remotely anywhere. It has also allowed businesses to focus more on employee outputs instead of input’s to measure performance, which leads us to our next question.
How do we measure employee performance, do we embrace employee autonomy?
We all come up against some of these challenges when trying to measure our own productivity.
Automation and delegation free us up to do higher-quality work in the same amount of time, which is a pretty straightforward action to boost productivity, even if we can’t necessarily measure the objective quality of that work.
On an individual level you need to consider the below:
- What parts of your job require your skills and knowledge
- What parts amount to chores
- What can be automated
- What can be delegated.
On a team level, managers can do a few things:
- Work with team members to make sure they’re working on tasks that align with their strengths. Help them find ways to maximise the amount of time they’re doing work they find meaningful and minimise time spent on everything else
- Think about what you’re measuring when you measure team output. It’s hard to benchmark individual productivity to business goals, but you should be able to tie your teams to things like releasing minimum-viable products on time, patient satisfaction scores, closed leads, etc. Be sure to involve employees in the process of setting these goals
- Consider creating a standardised yet flexible system of goal-setting. These are designed to fit hard-to-quantify elements into standard formats. Employees themselves are empowered to define.
Creating these types of expectations allows employees the autonomy to set their goals alongside managers in alignment with company goals. It provides individual, team, and company-wide guidelines to reach common goals and enable a good working from home environment.
We at CBC believe that having a great working environment for your employees is half the battle in creating a great company. If your employees are happy, your customer will be even happier!
