Managing Employees

Managing employees can be very difficult and even morally apprehensible to some people as a result of the type of decisions that managers are often told to enforce by upper level management. The most effective mangers will know how to make the job of employees more efficient and easier, and a good manager will be able to carefully transform a new employee into a efficient employee through analyzing personality traits of new employees, analyzing work patterns, and analyzing employee abilities. A good manager will thus be able to always have the respect of his employees, always be the person that brings employees into the best possible working relations with each other, and always bring about increased productivity through innovation.

During the time of the assembly line, Frederic Taylor developed what is now know as Scientific Management. The Taylor approach to management involved a scientific study of a worker to perform his or her duties in order to improve the exact motions that would be need in order to harness the greatest productivity of the worker, and often models would be made to increase productivity through formula like in the case of matching shovel size to employee weight like in the case of shoveling coal. Overall, the Taylor method worked well for assembly line production and for building houses that all looked exactly the same, but today most workers have vast variation in their daily work that involves evaluating circumstances and applying creativity to solve problems.

Today many large and diverse businesses will hire new employees and then give those employees all the same job as a first job in order to see how the new workers do the job and in order to draw out the employee attitude, and this is important for the business to identify how to place the worker after they have completed their first job. The first job thus can really bring out the physical limitations of the employee and the work patterns of the employee such as in the case of work values and attitudes about quality and performance. Overall, the first job of a new employee can show managers how to place, handle, and fully implement the new employee for future assignments.

Even more to the point is that newer generations of employees get offended when they are told what to do in many cases, and as a result managers need to specify what type of things need to be done and by what time and then the workers are expected to find ways to go about getting their jobs done. In such a case the manager would walk by and make suggestions every so often or help the employee that doesn't know what to do in order to give an example of how the work needs to be done. Thus today managers more than ever have to be sensitive to letting the workers know what needs to be done without offending the intelligence of the worker, and this is especially true given that today many workers have college degrees while many mangers still have only a high school diploma.

Eventually a manger will know each of his employees personally and will know how to relate to his employees, and agreement of how a worker and a manager relate to one another is called a social contract. The social contract is not arrived at by negotiating how to treat one another in a formal way, but instead it is arrived at by each party evaluating the other in informal ways. For example someone that looks sort of ruff and arm wrestles other employees at the break table will have a different social contract with a manager than a shy young woman that has been in home school all of her life.

In business management in a large company or a franchise, rules will exist called policies and procedures, and management will be responsible for administering those policies and procedures that basically describe every element of business and how to handle every situation. The written rules thus combined with upper level management that makes those rules can really define exactly how lower level managers are to act in every given situation. Unfortunately polices and procedures can be very strict or they can be very loose, and often upper level management can made policies and procedures and then completely ask lower level management to ignore the policies and procedures for the sake of being driven by situation.

Following the established polices and procedures of a business can sometimes be required of new managers that do not know how to manage, and then experienced managers are then expected to sort of know the spirit of what the company wants and then find ways to deliver what the company wants based upon what kind of resources that the manager has available. Sometimes polices and procedures are not even made by upper level members of management but instead sometimes they are made by corporate people that have no clue how to manage employees, and as a result often rifts happen between chains of management and chains of corporate officials. Overall, some businesses thus become so wildly broken through rifts between business heads that management often does not know exactly what to do.

The basic principle in most businesses is that when people do not know what to do they will do nothing instead of looking for things to do. Management thus is best to subdivide responsibility so that employees have responsibility over certain things or over certain regions. The success of management thus depends upon dividing responsibility, ensuring work is done by holding people accountable, and being instrumental in developing employees to become incredulity productive.

Ideally many forms of management involve being a coach of a team, and a team is different by far than a group of people despite how people often use the term team and group interchangeably. A team involves everyone working toward a common purpose in order that people can specialize in what they are good at while knowing how to do what everyone else in the team can do, and a team involves workers strengthening the weaker links and using their unique experiences and knowledge in order to provide for the common good. Although many businesses believe that they have teams, what they usually really have is workers in groups fighting for survival in ways that the common good is not realized.

Overall, management toady involves the psychology of employees, the careful evaluation of work patterns, the administration of a team, holding employees to standards of accountability, holding to polices and procedures, and bringing work done into relation to objectives set by upper level management. Managers thus have a very difficult job as they have to be very political to be successful, and managers have to know how to do must all jobs and they need to be seen doing the work of employees often in order to be respected by employees. Overall, civil rights laws and other business laws can make the work of management very difficult at best given their duties because what has become a highly political position becomes even more challenging when law enters into the equation.