6 Ways To Set Your Employees Up for Success

How do you set your employees up for success? Although the goal is to hire a good employee, a new hire is never fully ready to be productive the moment they join your team. They need to be onboarded, trained, given the right tools, and treated correctly. They need to feel a part of your organization right away and produce good results right away as well. This process makes for confident and prepared employees who feel a part of your team more quickly.

Some steps to set your employees up for success quickly and effectively.

Create an employee handbook. Having all your policies and processes down in writing is the best way to set up an employee for success, because they know what to expect from the company, from their values to benefits to dress code. If they have questions, they can refer back to it. It also saves you time when onboarding and training. Here’s a guide on how to create one. Create video tutorials for common tasks. Video tutorials stay relevant for long periods and save you time. Instead of setting aside time to take your new employee through a variety of tasks, you can set them up with the tutorials. They’re also easy to reuse for new hirings. Tips for tutorials: keep them short and sweet and easy to visualize. Screen recordings with a voiceover are an easy go-to. Check out our blog on building an effective webinar — you can apply the tips similarly to a tutorial. Use project management software: Programs like Microsoft Teams and Slack are good ways to maintain a flow of communication and organize that communication by teams, departments, and projects. Check out our blog on technologies for small businesses where we recommend some project management and team communication apps. Engage your employees for feedback. Feedback is a key way to set your employees up for success. Getting feedback is as important as giving it. Setting up monthly 1-on-1s between individual employees and managers helps structure feedback and make it a constant. During 1-on-1s, ask each employee to provide you constructive feedback, see how you can improve your process of explaining your demands, identify the biggest hurdles they had, etc. Afterwards, include action items for both you and them to accomplish. The best way to create an action item is to make it specific, measurable, actionable, and reasonable, and provide a timeline (SMART). Give them a deadline to complete the action items. Tip: if they can’t think of any feedback for you, ask them to name one thing you can start doing, one thing you can stop doing, and one thing you should continue to do. Empower your employees to use creative license. Giving employees reasonable freedom and the space to be creative will encourage innovation and set your employees up for success. Allow them to implement their own ideas, periodically. Ask them for ways they believe you can improve your business and let them feel like they have a stake in the business. This makes the business better, and grows their loyalty. Never gyp a good worker. Our CEO’s mentor and former boss, Pat Daley, used to preach to him that you “never gyp a good worker.” Treating a good worker right will reap many benefits, for them and for you. Don’t cheap out, don’t underpay them, and don’t speak down to them. Instead, reward them when appropriate, treat them well, and round their hours up. Show your employees you appreciate them through your actions and you’ll create not only happiness, but loyalty and appreciation. —– S-FX.com Small Business Solutions is a boutique web design and technology consulting agency geared towards start-up businesses, small businesses and non-profit businesses.  We specialize in implementing low cost technology solutions to maximize efficiency and reduce business operating costs.