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What Employees Really Want from Managers

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As an IT manager, your relationship with your team is important. It impacts important issues like employee engagement, productivity, and retention.

Understanding what your employees are looking for from you helps improve their performance. The more effectively you lead your team, the more your employees will do to positively impact the bottom line.

Discover five areas to focus on to fill your IT team’s needs and maximize performance.

1. Personal Interest

Get to know your employees on a personal level. For instance, talk about their families, hobbies, and interests outside of work. Also, find commonalities that you can have more in-depth discussions about. Additionally, follow up to see how your employees’ weekend activities were.

Having casual conversations with your employees shows you care about them as people. It also helps them see you as a person rather than just a manager. This helps enhance the employee experience. The more your team members enjoy their jobs, the longer they should perform their best and remain with your company.

2. Connection

Engage with your employees through individual conversations. For instance, recognize and celebrate each employee’s successes. Also, ask your employees what they feel they are doing well and what they believe they could do better. Additionally, provide constructive feedback to help your employees improve their performance.

Encourage your employees to share what is important to them and what they may be struggling with. Actively listen to what your employees say. Show that you support them. Offer to help as needed.

Enhancing individual connections with your team helps build respect for you as their leader.

3. Acknowledgment of Strengths

Regularly acknowledge each employee’s strengths. Focus on a 3 to 1 ratio when sharing what each employee did well and what they could improve on. This helps provide the motivation to continue to improve their performance. It also increases employee confidence and engagement.

4. Purpose and Impact

Help your employees understand how their contributions impact the company and carry out its mission. Your employees want to know how their efforts help reach the organization’s strategic goals. This shows how your team individually and collectively impacts the business.

Providing a sense of purpose and impact for your employees helps build feelings of belonging and job satisfaction. Your team should remain proactive and engaged while moving toward success.

5. Career Development

Develop a career plan with each of your employees. This shows how they can advance within the organization.

Be sure to offer opportunities to develop the skills needed for promotions. You might do this through training, delegation, or stretch assignments. The more you help your employees grow professionally, the longer they should remain with your company.

Need Help Finding Employees?

Work with RightStone to find qualified employees to join your IT team. Talk with us today.

How to Create a Positive Team Culture

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As an IT manager, you understand the importance of teamwork. When your team members communicate and collaborate well, they are better able to do their work. However, blending employees with different talents and personalities can result in challenges. This is one reason why having a strong team culture is necessary.

Follow these 6 guidelines to build a desirable team culture.

1. Define Your Team Culture

Talk with your team about what your culture should look like. This is important because your employees’ actions, interactions, and attitudes impact the effectiveness of your success. For instance, your team culture may be defined by having a positive mindset both inside and outside the office. This creates a strong team synergy that minimizes conflict and increases success. Everyone performs better when they work as a cohesive group. Different ideas lead to solutions for problems. Shared visions let your team see the future.

2. Learn from Other Successful Teams

Explore how teams with proven track records communicate, collaborate, and solve problems. For instance, incorporate ideas from companies like Google, Southwest Airlines, and Zappos to develop your teambuilding procedures. These companies are among the most successful in engagement, productivity, and goal attainment.

3. Encourage Collaboration

Instill in your team culture the importance of collaboration. Use your enthusiasm, self-discipline, and strengths to serve as a guide for teamwork. For instance, trust your team members to make hard decisions when you are away. Encourage them to discuss how you would handle a situation and carry out an appropriate plan of action.

4. Emphasize Your Company Mission and Core Values

Work with your team to create a list of team values based on your company’s mission and core values. Include in the discussion what everyone’s most important personal values are. Find out whether the same values impact their professional success and whether they would look for these values when hiring employees. Also, talk about what your team would not tolerate in the workplace. Use their answers to set team standards for job performance, customer service, and related issues.

5. Clarify Your Expectations

Explain to your team what you expect from them all of the time. Examples include honesty, accountability, commitment, conflict resolution, and pride in top performance. If your expectations are not being met, privately talk with the employee about the issue. Find out what it causing the problem and how you can help. If the employee does not want to set goals for improvement, assume responsibility, or respond to feedback, they may need to find another source of employment.

6. Continue to Build Your Team Culture

Use positive reinforcement to maintain your team culture. For instance, provide real-time feedback and coaching to help your employees maintain professional growth. Also, encourage your team to get involved in local charity events. Plus, organize employee family activities one weekend per month.

Hire Top-Notch IT Professionals

Add talent to your IT team with help from RightStone. Get in touch with us today.

Creating a Culture of Development: 3 Ways to Teach New Skills to Current Employees

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These days, it’s very easy to get bogged down in the day-to-day work of reacting to new challenges and just trying to stay afloat. But one of the ways companies can keep themselves in operation and spend less time reacting to changes is by preparing employees in advance.

A culture of development gives workers room to upskill, future-proofing their jobs and preparing for new eventualities. It also keeps employees engaged, which is vital in a world where 7 out of 10 U.S. workers don’t feel connected to their job.

How do you create a culture where development opportunities are not only available but taken? Use these three tips to get started.

Emphasize and Facilitate New Connections First

Conferences, classes, and workshops work wonders for development. However, by focusing only on those resources, you miss out on very real development opportunities. These are the opportunities that come through making new connections.

Mentorship has a huge impact on an individual’s career, and it offers insights you won’t find in a webinar. Yet, mentorship programs are often optional.

If you want to create a meaningful development culture, you may be better placing mentorship above other learning opportunities and allowing employees to ‘opt out’ of mentorship rather than encouraging them to ‘opt-in.’

Even better, nine in 10 workers who participate in career mentorship programs are happier with their jobs. Happy workers want to stay, learn, and grow.

Set Every Employee up with a Development Plan

Before expecting employees to find ways to upskill, you need to provide them with ideas, resources, and a plan of action.

Employee development plans provide the groundwork needed to pursue educational opportunities. They consider personal, professional, and organizational goals and identify the resources needed to get there. Even better, they provide an action plan that everyone agrees on, giving workers a chance to get started as soon as they’re ready.

Provide Adequate Funding for Development

Before you go to workers and ask them to do more, ask yourself this: what is your budget for professional development?

According to one report, there’s a real disconnect between what employers think they offer and what employees get.

So go back to the drawing board and ask: are you granting enough money for development?

Upskilling Workers Benefits Everyone

A culture of development benefits workers, teams, and the whole organization. However, it requires more than handing out passes to conferences. You need to start with a solid foundation to show employees what’s possible and how to get there. And then, you need to provide the resources they need to make it happen.

 

Would you like to learn more about building a development culture and what it means to staff it? Get in touch to learn how RightStone pairs consultants and clients to build relationships and broaden teams.