You may have hired an employee thinking he or she was a great fit for your company but it is now apparent they are lacking one thing: organization. Maybe you have assembled a team to complete a project and they are an outright mess. So how do you change your employees’ messy habits? Changing habits to ways of organization is key for the success of your company, and ultimately your employees’ future employed there.
Given written instructions. Whether it is a written job description at the beginning of employment or instructions for each tasks assigned, giving visual instructions, instead of oral ones, will help keep your employees on track. It will also give them something to reference if they ever become confused on the task at hand and will decrease the amount of questioning back to you.
Give clear procedures for reporting. When situations happen at work, whether bad or good, employees should know exactly who they are to report to. The same is true if a team is working on a multi-step project. Each step of the project may have a different reporting person and each of these needs to be made clear to your employees. Leaving your employees a guessing game to play can decrease productivity and increase the amount of time your employees can spend off-task.
Give advance instructions and notice. By letting employees know what is to be expected of them in the future, as appropriate, will allow them to plan ahead. You can give employees weekly schedules or even monthly to yearly schedules if your projects allow it. With this, an employee’s priorities and expectations will be clear.
Hold periodic meetings. Holding daily, weekly, or monthly meetings will help your employees reconnect and be able to report back to you on how their assigned task is moving along. This will also give you a chance to praise their hard work which will in turn motivate them to keep doing their best work with the task at hand. Encourage note taking at these meetings to lessen the chance of forgetfulness within your staff.
Organization needs to start at the top. You as their superior need to be organized to be a model example of what is expected of them. By being disorganized, employers will mimic your behaviors subconsciously, resulting in loss of productivity by all.
The organization your company has, or lack thereof, can unfortunately make or break the success you have. Changing habits to those of organization can be hard to break but if everyone on the totem pole is involved in changing and being organized, the chances of the new habits sticking will be great.
This post is brought to you by the good folks at Summit Assessment Solutions.
Photo credit: nist6ss