This was a brutal beginning to teaching the supervisors not only to plan the work, but to follow up to ensure that people were carrying out the plan. Productivity jumped following this exercise, which revealed the need for daily follow-up. Although this confrontational style is not appropriate for today’s more humane and challenging workplace, at the time it was very effective. The same exercise today would probably lead to an employee filing a complaint, at the very least.

Do you know how your employees use their time, plan their work, and manage their workflow? Would spending time exploring their work processes with them possibly lead to greater productivity? Borrow a few of the exercises suggested in this chapter.

• Ask each employee to draw his workflow from start to finish. Put
brown paper or butcher paper on the walls. Give the employee a
marker and ask him to depict every step of the process of doing his job. If he works in sales, draw boxes that start with the source of a lead and end with the customer’s signing the contract or with the follow-up after the sale. Minor items like calling to schedule appointments or writing follow-up letters may be drawn as circles
or clouds. Have the employee identify bottlenecks or areas where
he would like more tools or training. Use this depiction to acquaint yourself with the employee’s workday, habits, and ideal flow of work.

• Partner employees who have very different strengths and weaknesses. Give them joint deadlines or assignments. Each will contribute to the other.

• Ask employees what they want or don’t want. Retaining good
employees long-term is often as simple as asking them what it would take to help them work better and with greater satisfaction.

• Invest in the ongoing professional development of strong employees. Training, coaching, and mentoring should not be used just to fix problems. You can upgrade the productivity of strong employees and improve retention rates at the same time. Again, ask the employee what training she wants. Some employees see this as a
reward.

• Devote thought, time, and resources to creating or updating a
professional development plan for every employee as detailed in
Chapter 3.

Taken From: 201 Ways to Turn Any Employee Into a STAR Performer