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Are You Spending Enough Time With Your Employees?


Are You Spending Enough Time With Your Employees?
  • AuthorSonya Buck
  • DateApril 28, 2017
  • MediumNewsletter Article
One of the key reasons for maintaining contact with your employees is for their motivation, however there is a fine line between spending time and micromanaging your employees.

 

Whether you are a small or large business, or work for a corporate, time spent with your employees may unintentionally be sliding down your list of things to do. It may even be travel or meetings that now has most of your focus, making communication with staff less frequent.

 

One of the key reasons for maintaining contact with your employees is for their motivation. Surveys suggest staff who spend about 6 hours per week with their boss felt more inspired. With 6 hours per week, 29% of staff were more inspired, 30% more engaged, 16% more innovative and 15% more intrinsically motivated than those who spend only one hour per week with the boss. (Leadership IQ)

 

When we say 6 hours, we are talking about spending time with your direct reports. With a larger number of employees, it would be impossible to spend that amount of time with everyone. Different layers of management should be encouraged to interact with their staff for as much time as possible.

 

How should you utilise this 6 hours with employees? A great deal of this time should be spent as face to face, but if this is impossible, use Skype, email and telephone calls. Face to face can include team meetings, catch ups in the hallway and even chats in the car park.

 

Schedule regular one on one meetings and encourage staff to provide a project update document which will not only keep you informed, it forms and agenda of what needs to be discussed.

 

Spending more time with your employees helps you stay engaged with your business and enables you to help staff with any issues, it also gives you important training and development time with them.

 

There is a fine line with spending time and micromanaging your employees. Remember, micromanaging is taking control of every part, however small, of an enterprise or activity. You also know not to hover over staff while they are working, another big no-no.

 

Have you ever worked somewhere you thought the boss has given up, travels to avoid the office or just doesn’t really care? Alternatively, you may have felt invisible or had no one to turn to when you had a question? How demotivated did you feel? If you know how it feels, it’s easy to recognise why you need to spend time with your staff.

 

 

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