One of the biggest milestones for any company is hiring its very first employee. If you’ve been working alone for a long time then it can be extremely helpful to add an additional employee to your one-man team (I actually added a VA to my team a year ago!). Delegating tasks and accessing unique skill sets can greatly improve your business’s chances of success, and it’s a reliable way to future-proof your business. However, if you’ve never hired someone before or are too used to working alone, then it can be difficult to manage someone extra.
So in this post, we’re going to take a look at some tips that will help you successfully manage your first employee and ensure that they stick with your company.
Prepare professional solutions for managing your staff
When it comes to managing staff members, it’s incredibly important that you prepare professional solutions. There are a number of reasons for this:
- It makes your company seem more professional because you’re using industry-standard solutions instead of writing things on paper or random documents.
- It’s easier to scale your business should you hire more employees in the future to work with you.
- Getting accustomed to proper employee management solutions now makes it easier for you to manage future staff members.
- It’s a lot more efficient to use well-established strategies and solutions for managing staff than trying to wing it and reinvent the wheel.
Whether it’s managing employee clock in and clock outs or having a piece of software to schedule days that your employees come in on, it’s extremely important to use professional solutions instead of trying to do things yourself. This leads to a much more effective business and gives your employees a much better impression of your business and how it’s operated.
Learn to delegate tasks and trust your new employee
While it might sound strange to some, it’s actually incredibly common for business owners and managers to struggle to find something for their employees to do. Before you even hire a new employee, it’s important that you actually have a purpose for them instead of just hiring one for the sake of it. They should have a clearly defined role in your workplace and you need to delegate tasks for them in order for it to be worth the time and money investment.
One of the issues that tend to crop up is that you might find it difficult to let go of tasks that you’re accustomed to doing. You might also micromanage everything that your new employee does because you want to maintain a consistent level of quality and ensure that they’re doing everything correctly. While this is perfectly fine for the first week or so, you need to learn to trust your new employee with various tasks.
Building a sense of trust between you and your staff is a necessity for long-term growth and it helps create a comfortable office culture. If you’re unable to trust your staff with even the simplest of tasks, then it’s going to be difficult to scale your business further. In short, learn to trust your staff and give them tasks that you would normally take care of. Let them nurture their skills and allow them to fail now and then so they can learn from their mistakes. The worst thing you can do is look over their shoulder all the time and control everything they do.
Give clear instructions on how to complete the tasks you set them
It’s easy to just tell your employee to do something, but keep in mind that they aren’t familiar with your business and its processes like you are. This means that you should always provide some kind of instruction to your employees to ensure they know exactly what to do when you ask them to do something.
Don’t assume anything here. Communicate loud and clear when you give them a task and encourage them to ask questions when they’re unsure about something. This not only ensures that the task is completed to your expectations but also helps you build a sense of trust and improves communication between you and your employees.
Written instructions are also helpful, especially if you need to leave your employees to handle tasks on their own at times. The more detail you put into your written instructions and the more potential scenarios you account for, the faster your new employee will learn. The goal here is to help your employee become familiar with your processes and the way you run your business so they can truly become a part of your company and not just a bystander.