The most important things in a nutshell:
- In good employee onboarding, seamless, timely communication is essential.
- In order for the employee to perform, he or she must be made aware of the meaningfulness of his or her job.
- Tasks should be clearly defined and described, and procedures should also be practiced.
- The manager's control and reaction to the employee's performance shows that his actions are important and that the manager is interested in him and his development.
The issues of recruiting, managing and developing employees are more relevant than ever. On the one hand, we are going through generational changes in our industry, many company changes, market adjustments and succession planning. On the other hand, managers are increasingly challenged by many different characters, sensitivities, changing work attitudes and goals of employees. Totalitarian management styles are a thing of the past.
Employees in the studios include dual students, trainees, spa trainers, therapists, long-term employees and interns. How does the manager manage to pick up each individual to function well as a team?
What onboarding tools do you use?
Get busy with proper employee onboarding. What tools do you use to successfully integrate a new employee into the team? What information does the employee start their first day with? What does your expectation alignment look like? How do you harness the new employee's enthusiasm and motivation? In the fitness club, the customer journey is usually defined very strongly. How strongly is the employee journey defined in corporate? What does your onboarding process look like? What milestones can the employee achieve in their career?
Make sure each employee gets the information they need to do their job. Ensure seamless, timely communication. The "silent mail principle" becomes a flashpoint. The flow of information must not be a matter of chance. Say goodbye to WhatsApp groups, emails and QM folders in the office. There are now so many providers of contemporary communication. The goal is for every employee to be able to view and access the most important info from anywhere, anytime.
Get your employees on board
Keep getting long-time employees on board. Make it clear that the "we've always done it this way" principle is no guarantee of success. Create understanding within the team, for each other, with each other, regardless of age or seniority. Provide assistance, as digitization is also a challenge for some employees. Everyone is valuable.
You can already see how extensive the tasks in leadership are. Inevitably, your leadership boils down to situational action. Every employee is at a different level of knowledge and performance in his or her development in relation to a specific task that he or she has to perform.
How do you want to handle this? Do you only report to your employee when something is not going well? What signal do you send to your employee by doing this? For this, I recommend the principle of selective perception. Pay attention to what the employee is doing correctly instead of telling him again and again what he has forgotten or not done correctly. Positive behavior on the part of the employee must be reinforced and transferred to other employees, while misbehavior must be stopped promptly.
Many managers get into the situation here of admonishing the employee over and over again, true to the motto "How many times do I have to tell you ...". Tip: Don't do anything twice that didn't work the first time. In the event of misconduct, ask the employee what he or she will do differently next time in this situation.
Praise him for positive developments and recognize his contribution to achieving the company's goals. In other words, encourage him to think along with you. Lead by asking questions. Make it clear to him through questions what impact, whether positive or negative, his way of working has on other colleagues, the company and the customer. Create understanding for his actions.
Finding and retaining employees as a key leadership task
The goal of leadership is to make the best possible use of employees as a resource to achieve the company's goals. How can this goal be reconciled with the goals and motivations of employees? Managers must accept that in the future, companies will be much more dependent on good employees than good employees will be on companies.
Finding and, above all, retaining good employees will become one of the central tasks of leadership. In the past, employees applied to you; today, companies have to apply to employees. More and more, studio owners are investing in employee recruitment, great staff spaces, and looking for development and educational opportunities. And that's necessary, too. However, not enough. We need a beyond-fruit-basket leadership culture that happens on a daily basis. Is leadership, i.e. the interest of the manager in the employee, visible and tangible in the company?
Conveying a sense of purpose instead of monetary incentives
Great leadership quality also evokes greatness in others. If you want high-quality performance from your employee, you should first do your "homework" properly. What conditions must be created so that employees support the company's goals?
It is important to understand that an employee will only perform if you provide them with meaning. Simply offering monetary incentives is no longer enough for many employees. If you want to make your life as a manager easier, you should stop defining only company goals, key figures and performance characteristics. You must learn to define necessary behavior.
The employee must understand what behavior makes him and the company successful. So what must he do to bring about the desired result? Only the understanding of a task brings a lasting effect.
Merely giving instructions and guidelines will not lead to employees being motivated and results-oriented in the long term. Thus, the employee does not learn to take responsibility, but merely works off. And how good the quality of the work is then, you have certainly already made this experience yourself.
So how does the manager succeed in installing processes that are implemented in the long term and also in a good quality?
Focus on the most important tasks
First of all, the pool of tasks that employees have should be equalized. I distinguish between general tasks and those tasks that are of above-average importance for the success of the company.
Of course, I direct the focus of my employees primarily to the particularly important tasks. Tasks that ensure that more memberships, fewer cancellations and higher additional sales are generated. These tasks should be specifically defined and described, handed out to the employee in writing (analog and/or digital), formulated as a concrete expectation, and always updated.
Next, the approach described in the task, i.e., the behavior you want your employee to exhibit in the given situation, must be practiced. Practicing in order to sustainably consolidate the employee's know-how and skills must be an integral part of the weekly or monthly planning. Very few managers take the time to do this and then wonder why some tasks are not implemented or not implemented well.
Does the manager act as a role model here and master the content that is expected of the employee? What tools do you use to ensure this process? Are there guides for orientation, learning videos, seminar offerings, in-house coaching, pre- and post-task discussions? Do you follow up to ensure that the knowledge and behaviors learned and practiced are applied? How can you manage your employee if you do not accompany him or her "live" in a task?
If you do not include job shadowing in your daily work routine, you send the signal that the tasks you expect your employee to perform are not so important after all. With some employees, you will find that they only exhibit the desired behavior when the manager is present. As soon as the manager "isn't looking," the task won't get done the way it was agreed upon either.
In turn, for other employees who initially show high motivation to apply knowledge, you will notice a loss of motivation over time if there is no feedback from the manager on demonstrated behavior.
Respond to behavior
So, manager control and response make good performance visible and show the employee that his actions are important and that the manager is interested in him and his development. If you neglect these points, your employee will eventually ask himself for whom he is actually working here so motivated. So, regardless of whether the employee's behavior is positive or negative, there must be a reaction or consequence on your part to the employee's behavior. This also creates more fairness in the team.
Use praise and delegation meetings, annual reviews, development plans. Involve employees who demonstrate sustained and independent positive behavior in decision-making and implementation processes. Follow up on misconduct consistently and use motivational and critical discussions. Be sure to document employee reviews in writing so that you and the employee do not lack clarity.
Get external impulses
Finally, two questions remain. Who motivates the motivator? How should you integrate all that you have just read into your everyday management? I recommend that you make use of external impulses. Learn from leaders who generate their knowledge not from a book, but from everyday studio life. Get an overview of your leadership opportunities.
Providers such as Position Health Business Consulting, for example, offer you the Leadership and Management Academy. Online and offline. Take away valuable content for practical use here. Exchange ideas with other executives, gain motivation and applicable knowledge.
Many of you are not only managers, but also work in the operational day-to-day business yourself. Break down existing structures, review capacities, time guzzlers and previous staff scheduling.
Yes, all these processes are costly at the beginning, but leadership success can be planned. If you don't plan here, you plan to fail, you won't exploit the full potential of the company and its employees, and you will face major difficulties on the job market in the future. You don't need to walk this path alone, walk it with colleagues who have already walked it.
Source : BODYMEDIA
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Published on: 19 October 2023