Tag Archives: employees

Winter Sick Leave and How Best to Manage it

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How are you and your staff coping with the winter weather and the cold and flu bugs that always do the rounds at this time of year? Most people will need a bit of time off at some point during the year, to recover from an illness, so this post looks at the benefits of managing absence in a proactive way.

Both long and short term absences can cost a huge amount – both financially and in terms of manpower. It’s never an easy conversation to have with your employees and it can be difficult to keep up with what action is lawful to take. The bottom line is this – do nothing and the problem won’t go away, but could get worse. Finding out early on what’s going on with an employee who is absent can make a significant difference to your relationship and absence levels in the future. Talking to them allows you to get to the root of the problem and provide the support that they need. By focusing in on the absence it may also deter casual absenteeism – days off here and there.

Dealing with Short Term Absence

You should have a procedure in place that requires the employee to talk to a named person rather than leaving a message when reporting their absence. A standard form should then be completed recording the date, time, reason given and predicted time of absence, to make sure the relevant facts are gathered consistently for each absence.

Discussing the problem is essential especially when an employee is taking recurrent short term absences. Maybe there is a work issue which you can help them deal with and solve. Providing the support they need results in improved working relationships, morale and reduced absence.

You should always speak to a member of staff when they return to work, irrespective of how long they’ve been away. It shows you’re taking the situation seriously and acts as a deterrent for people who shouldn’t really be taking time off. Asking how someone is feeling after they’ve been off for even one day also shows that you care about them. Keep the conversation informal but take it seriously. Ensure confidentiality, have a clear structure, record what’s said and above all remain positive and supportive. You can ask them if they visited their GP, how they are feeling now and if there anything you can do to support them. Don’t ask any intrusive medical questions!

Communicating with your employees improves productivity and decreases absence, so follow these simple guidelines when dealing with short term sick leave. We’ll cover long term absence in another post in a few weeks time.

How do you deal with short term absence in your business?

Why Bother with Staff Appraisals?

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Why do appraisals? Because you don’t know if you don’t ask! Basically a conversation, appraisals are great way to help you get the best out of your employees and see your business grow. Useful for finding out information and giving feedback, appraisals are also a great opportunity for employees to reflect on their goals, objectives and contributions.

What can you find out?

  • There may be expertise or knowledge within your team that you didn’t know about
  • Some employees may not be happy with their role, have misconceptions about their jobs and abilities, or how they are doing in their role ? maybe they are struggling
  • You may find out that there are gaps in their knowledge
  • Maybe they are really happy and performing well!

So what?

This knowledge allows you to sort out problems and make sure that individuals are the right people for the right jobs. Appraisals can help you make changes to your business, such as:

  • If someone is more suited to a different role, re-structuring will make a more effective use of your resources
  • You can organise training that is needed to increase efficiency
  • You may need to change work patterns, recruit or provide different equipment or tools.

Getting your employees’ views allows you to find out what they need and gives them a sense of being in control of their job. Without talking to the people you work with, you remain oblivious to problems that may be hindering productivity, motivation and ultimately the success of your business.

What you can tell them?

An appraisal is your chance to say ‘well done’ and ask questions that identify why an individual may not be performing at their best. Money is not always the best way to reward people for good work; recognition and praise often work better as they encourage loyalty and focus. Individuals who have received positive feedback about their work are more likely to give 110%. It’s a win-win situation.

When are you next carrying out appraisals with your staff? What preparation will you be doing?

For more tips on appraisals, click here to watch a short video on my website.

The Beginner’s Guide to Management

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If you’re new to managing people, or you’ve been doing it for a while without much formal training, then the next workshop I’m running will be ideal for you.

Here are a few of the things you need to do as a manager:

  • Learn the principles of team building and how to get the best out of your team members
  • Understand the behaviours of different personality types and how people work together
  • Find out how to motivate and develop people
  • Practice the art of delegation
  • Learn the best practice for managing performance
  • Carry out a successful appraisal meeting
  • Learn how to give useful feedback
  • Be prepared for “that difficult conversation.”

When you can do all this, you’ll be a great manager, with a really productive team!

If all this sounds rather daunting, don’t worry. I’m running a workshop that will cover all this and more. It will give you the management skills you need and refresh and update the skills you already have.

The two day workshop will be held on 28 January and 11 February 2014 at Wargrave Cricket Pavilion, RG10 8BG. Places are limited, so click here to book your place.

Promotion – Are They Really Ready for It?

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You’ve got a great salesman working for you. He’s been with your business for some time and knows the company inside out. He knows all about your products and services and does a great job selling them. You have other members of the sales team who aren’t doing as well and who could learn a lot from this person. So you decide to promote him to Sales Manager. This way, he can lead the rest of the sales team, sharing his knowledge and experience with them. He can inspire them and help create a great sales department.

However, a few months after his promotion, you notice that things are not quite going to plan. Why is this? It is something that’s seen over and over again in companies where someone has been promoted because they’re good at what they do. They end up managing other people and not doing a very good of it. This is often because they have had no management training; they don’t know how to manage other people who are doing what they used to do.

Great salesmen – and many other professions – are good at the technical side of their jobs. They’re not necessarily natural people people.

So what do you do if it goes wrong?

Always start with a probationary period, to give you the chance to review the performance of your new manager

If it’s still not working out:

  • Give them a full opportunity to any discuss problems with their job
  • You’re under no obligation to give them their old job back, but you can discuss it, if it’s still vacant
  • Consider an alternative position before dismissal; tribunals will want you to consider all alternatives before you let someone go.

Before you promote someone to management level, take the time to find out if they are really ready for it. If not, what do you need to do to make them ready to make them into great managers?

To find out more, click here to watch a short video that?s on my website.

Are your people ready for promotion?

Getting the Best from Your Staff – Some Ideas from our Latest Workshop

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At the end of November 2012 we ran another of our very popular workshops, where we focused on how to get the best from your staff. After a short talk on issues to be considered, we opened up the floor to the delegates, to give them a chance to ask specific questions about their businesses and their staff.

Here are some of the topics that came up in the discussions, along with some of the solutions that were proposed.

Top tips for getting the best from your staff:

  • Appraisals are very effective for learning where your members of staff are at with their jobs. It gives you both a chance to talk about what’s expected and how people are performing against those expectations. Not carrying out regular appraisals can allow small issues to grow into major problems, if they’re not dealt with promptly.
  • Job Chats are a more informal way of talking to members of staff about how things are going. You might have a job chat over a cup of coffee rather than in a meeting or with agenda. You can do them more frequently than appraisals and they are a great way of picking up small issues that need to be discussed.
  • There are many ways of rewarding your staff that don’t involve money. Reward them by making them feel part of your business; if they can see how they have an influence on the growth of the business, they will get a great sense of achievement and feel important and needed.

And here are some of the topics we discussed:

Question: “One of my staff members works hard during office hours and takes work home, so we don’t mind if he’s a bit late in the morning. Another member of staff doesn’t seem to work as hard and is checked when he’s late. He’s complained about this. What can I do to keep both of them happy and working hard?”

Answer: “Talk to the second staff member to explain why you’re more flexible with his colleague. He may not be aware how hard his colleague is working or that he takes work home with him.”

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An idea: “We introduced an efficiency percentage report for our staff, based on the speed of finishing a project, completing it properly and the size of the project. The report is great for showing who is doing what within the business. Some staff didn’t like the idea when we introduced it, until we realised that they’re the ones who aren’t very busy. They’re finishing a project and not letting me know that they need more work to be getting on with! Now we know who is working efficiently, we can work on improving that across the whole business.”

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An issue: “A couple of members of staff asked me if they could work late and do some overtime and I agreed. I’m not often in the office and at the end of the first week, my general manager asked why they were working late. When I explained, he told me that these two members of staff were always late in the morning! Did they ask me instead of their manager because they knew what I’d say?”

A solution: Make sure you’re clear about what you agree with your staff and find out why they want to change their hours. Consider all the angles and speak to their managers before making a decision.

We’ll be running another workshop in the spring which you can attend if you have any issues to discuss. If you have anything you need help with now, please do get in touch by calling 0118 940 3032 or emailing sueferguson@optionshr.co.uk.

Don?t Make a Pantomime Out of HR

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Here’s a little festive tale of HR for you, called the Cinderella School of HR.

Cinderella doesn’t like having to work long hours in the run up to Christmas, and drop everything every time her step mother wants something. She prefers being able to work flexible hours, as she knows what she needs to get done. Helping her identify ways of improving her work/life balance makes her much more engaged with her work.

The Ugly Sisters spend a lot of time telling poor Cinders what to do. They find fault with everything that she does and yet they never lift a finger to help. Why do they pick on their step-sister in this way? Because they’ve both realised that they’re not reaching the objectives that were set at their last appraisals – they’re both underperforming! Making Cinderella look bad means that their mother won’t notice how useless they are. Perhaps they need the Fairy Godmother to carry out their next appraisals and see what needs to be done?

Prince Charming used to be far from charming. He was always doing his own thing, despite having been told what to do on numerous occasions. He turned up late for princely duties; he didn’t send his reports back to the office promptly, so Buttons couldn’t get the invoices out on time. The Fairy Godmother was called in to see if young Charming could be sacked. Instead she suggested a capability meeting, where she explained the concerns and set some goals for Charming to achieve in time for another meeting in two weeks. The King called back just a week later to say that Charming had suddenly become utterly charming and was in fact now the best Prince that the King had ever known. All that from one meeting!

So if Cinderella doesn’t seem pleased to be at work, ask her what you can do to improve her work/life balance.

If you’ve got Ugly Sisters not meeting their targets, or Princes not being charming, instead of trying to get rid of them, talk to them about how you can improve their performance and wave your magic wand! You could be surprised by the results. Oh yes you could!

What can you do to make sure you don’t make a pantomime out of HR in your business?

What’s the Best Way to Deal with Underperforming Staff?

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In a recent blog post I introduced you to Heather, who was receiving poor performance feedback. Click here to read about Heather . Did you have any solutions for her?

Here are our suggestions.

While Heather has a lot of experience developing training courses, she’s not getting good feedback from delivering them. The cause of this could be that she:

  • Only likes writing courses and not the delivery
  • Has been given the delivery, when it wasn’t originally part of her job
  • She doesn’t have the confidence in delivery of the information when asked questioned
  • She thinks she’s being challenged when someone asks her a question.

How can we help Heather?

First it is important to acknowledge Heather’s strengths – her knowledge and ability to write training courses. Then we need to find out what she thinks about the feedback she’s getting and how she feels about the delivery of the courses. Does she enjoy that part of the job? If so, we can help her build up her confidence. Has she had any training in presentation skills? If not and she wants to continue with the delivery, we can look at the right training to help her.

In situations like this, it’s important to hear all the sides of the story, before rushing to any conclusions or imposing a solution. Work with your members of staff to find the best outcome for both of you.

How do you deal with issues of under performance in your business? Leave a comment here to share your views and ideas.

Preventative HR – Keep Your Staff Happy Through Feedback

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One of the best ways you can keep your staff happy and working productively is by giving them regular feedback. Tell them how they’re doing against the standards you’ve set for them and your business.

We all like receiving praise, so make sure that you regularly praise your employees for a job well done. Depending on the size of your team, you can write down one positive comment for each of your team, every day or every week – and share this with them on a regular basis. When you see someone doing something well, praise them for it – you don’t need to wait for a formal meeting to deliver praise. In fact, praising someone as soon as you see them doing something well will have a far greater impact.

If you have members of staff who are doing really well, you can move them on in your business. If you have staff that are not doing so well, you need to tell them about it. And you need to do this promptly. Don’t leave it too long if there’s a performance issue, because it could get worse. Address it promptly rather than waiting for an annual appraisal. When someone is underperforming, they need you to tell them about it. You can’t make improvements if your boss doesn’t tell you that you’re not meeting their standards, or doing something the way they want it done.

Feedback can be delivered on an ad hoc basis, in team meetings and at appraisals, which should be done at least once a year ? more frequently with new members of staff. Use feedback and reviews to look at how you can help your employees improve their performance and you’ll be able to keep them happy and work hard for your business for longer.

To find out more about giving feedback, take a look at the short video on my website ? click here to watch it.

What’s the Best Way to Deal with Underperforming Staff?

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Heather works in the training department of a large IT organisation. She is responsible for designing and delivering interpersonal skills training, including communication skills, networking, and new management training classes.

Heather has excellent knowledge of how to design a training class. She includes behaviour modelling and practice into all her classes. She has also done research on what good communication consists of, how to network and what new managers need to know to be successful.

Sounds good so far!

However, people who attend Heather’s training classes often give her low ratings, saying that she has a hard time answering specific question. They say that she doesn’t seem approachable after the classes or when individuals want to ask questions.

What do you think may be causing Heather’s under performance?

How do you think a manager should address the problem of poor performance?

We’ll give you our opinion on this blog in a few week’s time. Leave a comment here to give us your suggestions!

How to Be a Great Boss

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It can be tough at the top. Here are some top tips to improve your personal success as well as the success of the people working for you.

  • Lead by example. Provide guidance and support and set the benchmark for team cohesiveness and performance.
  • Understand yourself and work on bettering yourself. What are the things you do well and what can you improve? How effective is your management style? By investing time in developing your individual skills you will drive your business forward and reap the rewards in terms of how successfully you lead your team.
  • Be a good all-rounder and play to all your strengths. Technical skills are important but so are soft skills such as people management skills. Do not neglect one in favour of the other.
  • Learn to delegate effectively. You can’t do it all! By relinquishing responsibility to others you are not only ensuring that your efforts are always directed to best effect but also that the people around you feel empowered to make decisions and improve the business.
  • Build a team that can work without you. A team that falls apart when you are on leave or away from the office is not good business.
  • Maintain boundaries: Whilst it is good to develop a good personal relationship with your colleagues, you must establish appropriate boundaries. This will be important during times when you have to make tough decisions that may not always be welcome by others.

What do you do to make sure that you’re a good boss? Share your tips (or mistakes!) with us by leaving a comment here.