Consult, consult again, consult better

Photo by Charles 🇵🇭 on Unsplash

Every small business owner wants to know what they have to do to get the best out of their employees (and numerous studies show that money is only half the story). HR gurus preach sweeping mantras of employee well-being – a vast, nebulous area that covers health, learning and development, motivational tools and benefits left, right and centre.

All valid up to a point – and often rather expensive – but most small business owners don’t know where to start when it comes to optimising employee performance. In the worst cases they also have to get over their own ad hoc and rather scary personnel management techniques.

The first thing to do is to consult your employees. Then keep consulting them. Consultation is the express highway to performance. It is the most important thing that you can do to get your employees to perform better. It costs nothing except for some time and consistency.

Consult often, consult well and you are most of the way there.

Caveats

Be honest with yourself. You simply may not be the right person to do the consultation process yourself and you might need independent help. (But if, for whatever reason, you feel that you cannot do it – perhaps this is also an issue that needs resolving.)

Also note that consulting your employees is not the same as having informal chats with them or giving them an annual performance review. It is somewhere in the middle: a regular, semi-formal and structured session that employees know about in advance and can prepare for.

Employee performance action plan

Explain to your employees that a traditional annual performance review is no longer fit for purpose for either personal or business success and that you want performance management to be a more frequent two-way process. They will respect you immediately for implementing such a procedure.
Devise a simple checklist to give the consultations a structure and keep the answers in a manageable format. We suggest short monthly consultations are the best way to keep everyday performance in the forefront of everyone’s minds. Then more comprehensive quarterly reviews when you can address strategic goals.
Consult all your managers and employees individually for their views on how to optimise each of the three key areas of motivation, competence and management effectiveness within your company. Once you start to see how these three areas affect each other you will be well on the road to creating a virtuous circle for optimising employee performance.
Analyse the results and compare them to the actual state of things. You will find that your employees are giving you free, invaluable advice on how to improve structures, relationships, processes and procedures within your company. Discard the impractical and focus on the priorities. Look at how you can change things given the resources available to you. (You will be amazed at how much employee performance improves just by the very fact of consulting in a meaningful and regular fashion.)

So, put on hold your plans for expensive company visits to Disneyland or free employee pet insurance or surfing Fridays and start a new plan to consult, consult again, consult better.

Robert Scrafton