Hello, this is Laura Lee Rose – author of TimePeace: Making peace with time – and I am a business and efficiency coach that specializes in time management, project management and work-life balance strategies. I help busy professionals and entrepreneurs create effective systems so that they can comfortably delegate to others, be more profitable and have time to enjoy life even if they don’t have time to learn new technology or train their staff.  I have a knack for taking big ideas and converting them into smart, sound, and actionable ideas.

 

At the end of the day, I transform the way you run your business into a business you love to run.

Today’s comment came from a busy professional and an entrepreneur:

Is it better to terminate or reassign an employee that is not working out?

I have spent a lot of time training an employee. She is a great person, but I have to remind her several times to do something. I am not sure if she is just not in the right role or if she will always need too much oversight. I am curious how others have handled something like this.

You are not alone. Many new business owners struggle with this same question.

One thing to keep in mind (at all times) is that you are in the business to make money. You essentially hire staff to help you achieve your business goals.

You are not responsible for your employees’ happiness or success in their roles and responsibilities. You can encourage, support and train them – but you are not ultimately responsible for their success. They are.

Your Responsibilities:

What you are responsible is to provide clear goals and directives. You accomplish this by several methods:

• Visible Mission, Vision and Purpose goals
  1. Do you have a company mission, vision purpose statements?
  2. Are they strategically visible where all your employees can see them?
• Regular and frequent one-on-one meetings with your employees
  1. Are you conducting frequent one-on-one meetings with your employees?
  2. Have you validated that they not only understand the company mission but how it translate to their individual roles and responsibilities
• Clear directives
  1. Do you have your business goals clearly documented in the form of SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound) goals
  2. Does each of your employees understand how their tasks and business goals support and accomplish those business goals?
  3. Does each of your employees have a PBC (Personal Business Commitment) plan that documents their SMART goals to achieve the company goals?

Once you have clearly articulated and published your business goals and validated each employee’s roles and responsibilities in achieving those goals, you can start determining whether a specific employee is “right” for your company.

Have you provided proper training?

Before you hire staff, you need to verify that your training and orientation materials are in place. If you don’t want to be spending time reminding your employees about the tasks and procedures, make sure they are documented in such a way that they can easily reference.

 

Some examples are:

• Provide Checklists and document your procedures
• Conduct frequent status meetings to review their progress and checklist status
• Institute the buddy system in which a more senior staff is buddies with a junior staff member.
• Delegate team leaders such that they oversee team progress and staff reports
• Automate the more tedious and error-prone items to reduce error and rework
• Automate and optimize items that are done over and over again
• Optimize the procedures to only items that are MUST DO to bring in revenue, reduce costs or increase client satisfaction
• If you cannot associate a Business Reason (example: revenue generating reason) for the task, reconsider the need for that task

 

Once you have streamlined your processes and policies, you can be assured that you have provided your employees with the best possible road-map to success.

Is she right for the job?

Once you have done your homework regarding setting up SMART goals, it is easier to assess each employee’s fit. Since you have established your Success Criteria and how you are going to Measure against your Success Criteria, you can determine if your employees are meeting expectations.

Several things that might help further are:

• Have you documented all the tasks and expectations in a Personal Business Commitment (PBC) document? In other words, have you outlined for each employee – how their role and responsibilities are achieving your business goals?
• Have you documented their PBCs in the form of SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-bound)?
• Do your employees understand the consequences of not meeting those PBC metrics? (for instance: being placed on a Performance Improvement Plan, on probation or fired)?
• Have your employees signed their PBCs, acknowledging that they understand their commitments and consequences of their performance.

Once you have clearly articulated the expectations for the position in this manner and streamlined the responsibly and procedures, more often than not – it is the employee that will decide if this position is right for them.

For example: A SMART goal would be:

• If you have to remind her several times to do something – are those
  “things” explicitly documented in a checklist? (Being very specific)
• Do you have a way to measure or tell if she has accomplished those items, on time and with the quality that you have previously defined? Does she have to report on the status or update a tracking system? (Measurable)
• Is it reasonable that someone in that position can accomplish that task in the defined time frame? (Achievable) Or would some automation and optimization reduce the error-prone nature of the task?
• Can you describe the How and Why this task is relevant to bringing in revenue? (Relevant to your business goals)
• And does this have a time limit. Does she need to do this task every day? once a week? When should it be accomplished? (Time-bound).

If she needs to improve upon her performance – what specific things does she need to accomplish in a certain amount of time.  What are the consequences for not achieving those specific and measurable tasks within the deadline?  (This is what is known as a documented PIP or Performance Improvement Plan)

Conclusion:

If you are “wishy-washy” on your expectations, it’s easy for your employees to give you “wishy-washy” results.  Having your expectations and consequences well documented (and signed by your employee) will make the next steps of performance evaluation much easier.

If you need additional help on this topic, please contact LauraRose@RoseCoaching.info

Or sign up for a complementary one-on-one coaching call, just use this link https://www.timetrade.com/book/WFSFQ