Tips For Successfully Managing Your Very First Employee (Part 2)
Ready to hire your very first employee? If so, congratulations! There’s no other business growth milestone quite like it. Prepare yourself for a whole new set of challenges, but if you can learn to manage your first employee effectively, you’ll be in a great position to continue growing your team and your business!
Management doesn’t always come easily, but I maintain that anyone can learn how to do it. In Part 1 of this post(click here to read), I shared 6 tips to help ensure your new employee will actually save you time, rather than becoming needy.
In Part 2, I’ll share my tips for helping your employee grow as a confident, productive member of your team, as well as what to do if you eventually lose them.
Clarify Processes, Policies, & Procedures
The key to success in a growing business is organization. As a solopreneur, you undoubtedly had tons of systems and processes in place to ensure that priorities got tackled, tasks didn’t fall through the cracks, and your time was used efficiently. Now it’s time to scale that up.
Before your employee’s first day, spend some time thinking about your systems and processes. Which ones work really well? Which ones need a revisit? Which ones work well when it’s just you, but will fall apart when more people are added? Do all you can to ensure your processes are air airtight and well-documented.
When your new employee starts, you’ll inevitably find problems with your company processes, but the better-prepared you are, the fewer walls you should hit. Also, if all your processes are well-documented, it’ll be easier to figure out where a problem starts and ends.
Having these processes laid out clearly will also help encourage your employees to document their actions in a day. As a manager, the better your employees’ work is documented, the less time you have to spend getting status updates in one-on-one meetings and the more time you can spend being proactive about growing the business together.
Have employees track their time, even if they aren’t paid hourly. This will help you to understand and better manage where employee time is being spent. We also recommend having your employees document all interactions with customers, progress on tasks, and, of course, any sales they make.
AllProWebTools makes it easy for your employees to leave this kind of documentation, through a tool called theWorkflow Timeline. This live feed of all your business’s updates is ideal for ensuring your employees and your business as a whole are on track, all at a glance. Click here to learn more about the Workflow Timeline.
Plan Their First Successes
Nothing boosts confidence like success, and confident employees are vastly more valuable to a small business than timid ones. Confident employees will be able to direct themselves, make important decisions, and lend charisma to your business. So it’s crucial to give new employees a taste of success as soon as possible.
Have some assignments ready for them that you know they’ll be able to complete on their first day, and devote a significant amount of time to discussing your and their goals for the position. As much as possible, avoid having the first day be a day full of unimportant “busy-work.” Instead, an “engagement-heavy” first day, where your new employee works on meaningful tasks, will instill much more confidence.
I can’t express enough how much AllProWebTools enables this. First of all, the tasking system makes it easy for you to have a number of pre-loaded “success generator” tasks in their console, which they can work on whenever they have time. Second, the system encourages employees to self-learn and self-direct, again boosting confidence.
If you chose your new hire carefully and implement the tips from this blog post, as well as Part 1, you’ll quickly develop a self-sufficient, empowered, confident employee. Once you’ve built some trust, you might be able to get even more productivity out of your employee by allowing them to incorporate some flexibility into their scheduling.
Allowing your employees to work when and where they’re most productive has both short-term and long-term benefits.
· Take advantage of your employees’ most productive hours, even if those aren’t between 9 and 5
· Increase your odds of having employees stay with you for the long haul
· Make your team more resilient against things like flu bugs, snow days, and technical difficulties by making work from home an option on those days
Worried about accountability with work-from-home employees? Try AllProWebTools, which allows you to get insight into what your employees are working on and how long it’s taking them.
Future-Proof the Position
Click HERE To Keep Reading How To “Future Proof The Position”!
