As an employer, it can sometimes be difficult to know who is a good employee and who is not. When you go through the screening process to look for noteworthy applicants, sometimes the process can take much longer than you think. You begin to wonder if you ll ever find someone who is worthy enough to take the position and run with it like you had once hoped. You are afraid to relinquish even the slightest bit of control or responsibility to someone else. Nowhere else is this true than when you run a small business.
When you are just starting out as a small business owner, it is extremely important to surround yourself not only with people who are fully capable (and then some) to do the tasks at hand, but who are also trustworthy people with morals. Too many times, business owners get burned by employees who they “thought” were worthy of the job but later found out that they were doing things that were not ethical. Even something as small as taking office supplies (I.e. paper clips, pens, notepads) from the office can turn into a larger issue later on. This is why it is extremely important for employers to have crystal clear, written guidelines as to what the expected conduct should be around the office.
While you do not want to restrict your employees so much that they absolutely dread doing any work for you, you also want to make sure that there is a clear understanding on both sides that certain behaviors will result in some sort of penalization. For instance, there is a friend of mine who works in an office where another employee was fired because she actually spit at the boss before turning around and yelling at her boss, using obscene language. When asked what it was this employee was so upset about, it turns out that her boss had approached her and another employee and had asked if they could work a few weekends. Instead of trying to find a rational approach to figuring out whether or not they could work out an alternative, the employee simply flipped out. If you were a business owner, how would you have handled the situation? Would you have approached the employee regarding a matter like that, or would you have handled it via email or telephone? As it turned out, the employee soon quit her job and went on to harass someone else, but what lesson was learned in the interim?
Another problem that arises from trust issues is the issue of micromanaging someone. Micromanaging has killed more businesses than could ever keep count. And why is this? If you are an employee who is doing your absolute best on every task assigned to you, but you constantly have someone looking over your shoulder and asking for updates or summaries of what you ve done, how would that make you feel? Would you be stressed out? What would it do for your motivation? Rightfully so, many employers want to know (at least initially) what kind of person they have hired to do the work that is required. Therefore, they are justified in wanting to keep a close eye on you until they can be sure that you are ok to handle other tasks on your own. However, if you have been with a company for a period longer than six months and you are still attending one on one meetings with your boss every other day regarding work that you have submitted, it is only a matter of time before you quit your job or go crazy.
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