Managing employees in a pro-active way

Six ways to ensure that your employees solve problems without you.
 

Here's an interesting article by Yves Morieux, senior partner at Boston Consulting Group, inasmuch as we see a series of elements usable by Italian SMEs.
The world is changing and companies, thanks to globalization and technology, are having to tackle new markets and new competitors.
Because they face a wide range of opportunities, customers are harder to please, in that they require more quality set against low prices.Therefore we can identify six rules: The first three relate to ability to put people in the right conditions to work; the others are of encouragement, motivating the persons to use all their skills to tackle the case at hand.
 
The first rule that we analyse is to improve understanding of what their colleagues do; everyone should be able to understand what the job consists of, and the duty of good entrepreneur is to make sure that there is this awareness, so that one has to analyse the actual context in which the work is carried out to discover how much the staff need to cooperate and in what measure they manage to do the same. The question therefore is understanding where the problem lies and grasping the underlying causes in order to proceed with the application of the other rules.

The second rule is to strengthen the people who act as agents of integration, enhancing their responsibility/accountability and giving them a greater say on various topics. The bigger the company, the more the agents of integration and need to reduce the formal rules.
The third rule that a company should follow is to increase collaboration with their employees, so that they too take risks, showing spirit of initiative in order to achieve the goal.
Another important rule that should not be overlooked is to increase the need for reciprocity: or expand the responsibilities over and beyond ones own activities onto those that you do not have direct control over.

The fifth rule is to make your employee feel the shadow of the future, making him or her partaker of projects and processes that are characterizing the change or structural transformation within the company.
The last rule that employers must keep in mind is to introduce penalties for those who do not cooperate to solve a problem, even if this does not fall directly under their tasks, thus increasing the sense of responsibility and benefits that will arise so that that the entire area of production cooperates effectively to reach the preset objective.
Employee satisfaction grows along with the performance of the company, when the latter removes the complexities that lead to creating a sense of frustration and inefficiency.

Finally here are the things you absolutely should
not do:
• do not ever attribute the responsibility for a problem to the mentality of others;
• do not allow decisions to be “foisted” upon you: return them to the level of those who were unable to find a solution;
• do not rely on financial incentives: it is much better to give the employee the opportunity to obtain concrete answers to their questions through feedback cycles.

By Marco Randazzo
Consulting Network Project
[email protected] - www.consultingnp.net