10 ways to make your employees love you
- added July 24, 2008
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- sinlung
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Keeping your employees happy is the key to success. For any organisation to run successfully, you must understand that whether your employees are satisfied with the working conditions or not. Below are 10 best ways to make your employees love you.
Confining myself to 10 turned out to be hard—there are so many ways to manage badly and so many things that is important to do well. So here are 10 to start off with, and I hope people will add more:
1. Let’s open with the big one: Don’t be a jerk. Yelling, disparaging people, defensiveness, shooting the messenger, and publicly berating someone are all off limits. Good people have options, and few of them will want to work for a jerk.
2. Be reasonable. Yes, you want to hold people to high standards, but that doesn’t mean you should demand the truly impossible or insist that an employee work all weekend for something that easily could wait.
3. Keep your word. Do what you say you’re going to do, in whatever timeline you committed to—whether it’s giving feedback on a project, liaising with another department, or making a raise come through. (A subset of this: Be responsive. If people have to follow up with you to get a response, you’re not being responsive enough. It only takes 30 seconds to write, “I won’t have time to look at this until next week.” If nothing else, let people know where things stand.)
4. Make sure your staff feels respected and valued: Act in ways that show you care about their quality of life. And don’t underestimate the impact of regularly making sure great employees know you think they’re great.
5. Solicit feedback. Ask for input on everything from how the staffer thinks last week’s event went to what you could be doing to make her job easier. Good managers know their employees have a different perspective to share, and they value it, rather than ignoring it or feeling threatened by it.
6. Stay focused on results. Don’t have rules and policies for their own sake; make sure each is connected to an actual business need, and be willing to bend the rules if it makes sense overall.
7. Figure out what people need to do their job better, and help them get it. This can range from training and better equipment to the elimination of a counterproductive policy, your intervention with a problem coworker or another department, advice on handling a sticky situation, and more targeted feedback.
Confining myself to 10 turned out to be hard—there are so many ways to manage badly and so many things that is important to do well. So here are 10 to start off with, and I hope people will add more:
1. Let’s open with the big one: Don’t be a jerk. Yelling, disparaging people, defensiveness, shooting the messenger, and publicly berating someone are all off limits. Good people have options, and few of them will want to work for a jerk.
2. Be reasonable. Yes, you want to hold people to high standards, but that doesn’t mean you should demand the truly impossible or insist that an employee work all weekend for something that easily could wait.
3. Keep your word. Do what you say you’re going to do, in whatever timeline you committed to—whether it’s giving feedback on a project, liaising with another department, or making a raise come through. (A subset of this: Be responsive. If people have to follow up with you to get a response, you’re not being responsive enough. It only takes 30 seconds to write, “I won’t have time to look at this until next week.” If nothing else, let people know where things stand.)
4. Make sure your staff feels respected and valued: Act in ways that show you care about their quality of life. And don’t underestimate the impact of regularly making sure great employees know you think they’re great.
5. Solicit feedback. Ask for input on everything from how the staffer thinks last week’s event went to what you could be doing to make her job easier. Good managers know their employees have a different perspective to share, and they value it, rather than ignoring it or feeling threatened by it.
6. Stay focused on results. Don’t have rules and policies for their own sake; make sure each is connected to an actual business need, and be willing to bend the rules if it makes sense overall.
7. Figure out what people need to do their job better, and help them get it. This can range from training and better equipment to the elimination of a counterproductive policy, your intervention with a problem coworker or another department, advice on handling a sticky situation, and more targeted feedback.
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