An organized team is a strong team - but just how can you organize your team efficiently? There are a lot of tasks involved when managing a team of staff including scheduling shifts and paying each employee the right amount on time. For some newbie employers, the whole process can seem quite intimidating. But actually managing staff doesn’t have to be complicated. Below are just a few ways to organize your staff efficiently.
Set clear team goals
While encouraging competition can be beneficial in some work environments, it’s often much more beneficial to encourage camaraderie. One way to do this is to set clear team goals which everyone can work towards. These goals could include clear targets and rewards that benefit everyone (such as giving everyone a bonus if a certain number of sales are made in a year). Alternatively, you could set more continuous goals such as trying to encourage a positive review out of every customer. You can come up with these goals yourself or you can get your team to suggest goals. By involving your team members in suggesting company goals, you can make them feel like a more valuable asset and motivate them to chase these goals.
Give staff meetings a purpose
Meetings are the most traditional way of organizing staff. They’re a chance to get everyone together so that you can share news or get feedback. Unfortunately, many meetings end up being a waste of time. Why? Because there’s no clear purpose to them. While it may seem like a good idea to host a meeting every morning to keep everyone on the same page, it’s likely that half of these meetings aren’t really achieving anything. This is why it’s better to give every meeting a clear purpose from the onset (such as settling on a time and date for Xmas party or narrowing down a menu in a restaurant) and to stick to this sole purpose. By notifying staff members of the meeting’s purpose beforehand, you can also encourage them to each prepare and hopefully come to a definitive conclusion by the end.
Start a group chat
Meetings are generally better for topics that require a more in-depth discussion. When it comes to general news or topics that require only a small amount of feedback, there’s a much more efficient alternative to meetings - and that’s a team group chat. A lot of companies use WhatsApp for this, but there are more professional options that some companies may prefer like Slack, Flock, Google Chat and Microsoft Teams. Get all your team members to join this group chat. On top of communicating via instant message, take advantage of the ability to share links and files.
Create clear roles
While there may be certain tasks that everyone is trained to do and everyone is expected to help out on, there could be other tasks that are better suited to certain individuals. By creating clear roles, you can allow certain employees to develop a specialism. This can make each employee feel more valued. It can also reduce the need to cross-train your team as much and can allow employees to focus more attention on individual tasks. To help determine roles, work out what roles you can provide and then assess your team to work out what skill each employee has. It’s worth also talking to each employee to find out what they want to do so that you don’t assign a role to someone that they dislike.
Automate work schedules
In shift-based jobs with large teams of staff, work scheduling can often be a time-consuming and challenging task. However, it doesn’t have to be. Using modern digital tools, it’s possible to automate much of the process. This includes using a staff scheduling template into which employees can be automatically assigned shifts based on their available hours and role. Such software can also be used to easily make last minute adjustments to shift schedules if an employee suddenly leaves or is sick. New employees and scheduled absence can also be factored in.
Use digital time clocks
On top of automated work schedules, it makes sense to also use digital time clocks. These allow employees to clock in and clock out of shifts, digitally recording the hours they work and automatically converting these hours into pay. Digital time clocks can come in the form of wall-mounted devices that employees scan their finger on, or app-based time clocks that allow employees to clock in/out from any location. Many of these time clocks can be integrated with shift scheduling software, allowing you to automatically record lateness and absence, as well as recording when employees work overtime so that they can receive overtime pay.
Automate your payroll
The payroll process itself is also worth automating. Once you’ve digitally clocked everyone’s hours and automatically calculated their pay, you can then set up automatic payments on a certain time and date each week/month. Each employee’s wage can be automatically taken out of your account and a payslip can be automatically sent to each employee via email. This can free up huge amounts of time if you’re used to doing it all manually. That said, you may still want to double-check payments to make sure there are no errors.
Schedule performance reviews
Performance reviews are a useful way of communicating with employees the things that they are doing well and the things that they are doing not so well. They are a chance to offer advice and set individual goals to each employee in private. They are also a chance to collect feedback from employees about the things that you are doing right and wrong. It’s worth creating an appraisal schedule - some companies schedule performance reviews every few months, while others do it once per year. Try to do them all at the same time and make sure you spend an equal amount of time with each employee.
Hire the right managers to help
Once your team reaches a certain size, it’s going to be very hard to manage everyone yourself. This is when you need to consider hiring or promoting managers to help you. These need to be individuals who you trust and who you think are capable to take on the extra responsibility. A lot of new employers start by hiring staff with management experience. Promoting staff to management positions is something that you can do over time once you’ve developed long-term relationships with employees who you believe are competent enough to become managers.
Don't micromanage
Micromanaging is something that many managers do without realizing. It involves trying to manage every detail - which could include quality checking every piece of work that every individual employee completes and trying to make decisions for them. Micromanaging is exhausting for you and your employees. Your employees will feel they have no trust and you may feel that they resent you for this. This is why it’s important to know when to focus on employees and when to leave employees alone. Often, the only time to focus intently on an employee is when they are consistently making mistakes or performing poorly. Even in these cases, it’s important to not scrutinize too much as the pressure may lead to more mistakes - observe closely, offer feedback and then give them space to see if they improve.
