New Employees

When you start your business you may be the only employee, or one of only a few. But as a business grows, you may need even more employees in order to meet the demands of a growing customer base. Eventually, you should step away from handling the everyday workload and into a more managerial role. This can be difficult, as up to this point you have probably tried to handle it all yourself. Now you will need to delegate the major responsibilities to key employees and be able to trust that they know what they're doing. The fact is that they may not be as proficient as you, but the costs of trying to do it all yourself as your business continues to grow are much higher than the cost of a few mistakes made by employees in the learning process.

Managing Employees

Delegating the workload to employees is relatively easy. Managing them, on the other hand, can be difficult. It's not enough to simply tell them what the end result needs to be; you need to make sure they are properly trained to do their jobs. You will probably need to promote some of your employees into supervisory roles, and you may even need a full time manager for day-to-day operations. You must be able to trust the people you hire or promote into these positions, because the success of your business will depend largely on their ability to do the jobs you've asked them to do.

Employee Relations

Part of managing your employees effectively is maintaining good relations with them. It goes without saying that you must treat all your employees with respect and courtesy, and that you can expect the same from them. However, things won't always run smoothly. In order to keep things moving as well as possible, you will need to establish clear rules and policies for all of your employees.

With firmly established policies in place, there should be no question about what is or is not appropriate behaviour on the job. If an employee presents a problem, you need to be prepared not only to react accordingly, but also to record any transgressions of your workplace rules or policies in a log. If you ever find yourself in the unfortunate position of having to fire an employee for repeatedly breaking with your policies, a log of past offences may protect you from being charged with wrongful dismissal.