A Proactive Approach to Employee Management

You might have fallen into what resembles a management role by mere virtue of having taken the initiative to create your own business which subsequently needs employees or you may have worked your way up the ranks of someone else’s hustle to find yourself in a management position, but either way, it’s better to employ a proactive approach to the management of the employees you oversee than a reactive one. Beyond the obvious reasons of not having to play catch-up all the time, you create the perfect opportunity for everybody involved to grow along with the organisation and you also build up a culture of taking the initiative when the opportunity to present itself comes around.

How do you go about instituting and maintaining a more proactive approach to employee management though? After all, it rolls off the tongue, but in action what exactly would you do in the name of approaching employee management more proactively?

Formulating a flexible workplace structure

Well in truth I should have probably said that a workplace structure that’s as flexible as is within reason should be formulated, otherwise you might as well just hire independent contractors who come in on a per-project basis, something which naturally means you’d have to part with more money by way of remuneration, of course.

Otherwise rules should be there, but only to make up the fundamentals. Flexibility is required to get the most out of the unique operational methodologies each worker will naturally go about their job with, so within reason you should leave ample room for some flexibility. Since everybody is going to be stuck in rush-hour traffic every single day for example, how about something like a partially-remote workday where the first couple to a few hours of the workday can be completed remotely?

That’s just one example – there are so many different ways through which some flexibility could be introduced and maintained.

Worst-case scenario preparation

There’s definitely more than one solid reason why people who assume management positions get the big-bucks. It’s a very demanding job which is often thankless too, but in the same way that you continuously have to come up with innovative ways of just making sure the required job gets done, you’d best work at instilling mechanisms which cover as many of the potential worst-case scenarios as possible. You’d have to be smart about it though – it’s no use just adding another three or four pages of content to the employee handbook on workplace safety for example. Rather refine the existing one and see how whatever needs to be added can be included in a more concise manner that fits in with the bigger picture.

Make sure all systems are efficient in their primary functionality, which might mean having to test them every now and then. The last thing you’d want is having to deal with overtime disputes in New Jersey for example, given the very strong legal representation around those issues, so make sure your overtime clocking system is functioning well if that is indeed something you use.