Increase your productivity with a better outcome for everyone

It is often said that we spend more time with our employees and work colleagues than with our friends and loved ones. Relationships at work can develop and grow in importance over many years. Work teams can often begin to feel a bit like being in a family situation where people can look out for each other and notice when things are not quite right. As with all families a multitude of feelings go along with this: both feelings of belonging and working together but also feelings such as exclusion, feeling picked on etc.

Personal Problems in your workplace decrease productivity.

As a fellow human being you know that personal problems are bound to come into the workplace to a varying degree and affect, quite naturally, staff member’s work performance for a while. There may be particular pressures at home which make it difficult for your staff to balance work and home. You have to balance everything out knowing that it is not only you who are affected by someone not being 100% but that that person is often carried by the team. Your responsibility is to get the task done and judge when individual problems have to come secondary to the completion of the task.

How do I know if there are problems?

A change in any of the following areas may indicate there are problems at home:

Irregular Attendance – frequent absences from work for minor unrelated conditions
Poor time keeping or missing meetings or deadlines
Change in mood. Irritability or low mood. Anxiety over minor tasks or incidents
Deterioration in the quality of work
Complaints from colleagues or students
Physical signs such as sudden weight loss or gain, poor personal hygiene, lack or care with appearance

What do I do now?

In many cases everyday management interventions can remedy the situation through regular supervisory support, giving your staff space to feel supported and talk through any difficulty. Working together on assuring extra help or reallocation of work when needed in order for the task to be completed can be supportive.

There are times as an employer or manager, however, when you may feel that what you have to offer is not enough to manage the difficulties.
Your time is limited. You do not have the time it takes to listen in depth to your staff’s problems.
However much you want to help, you may also recognise the limitations to the help you can provide given the nature of the management relationship where you have the power ultimately to hire or fire.
You may feel that the nature of the problem you are being presented with is beyond your remit as a manager or you may feel “out of your depth”.
You may feel you want to respect your staff member’s privacy when you may not be the most appropriate person to talk to about a problem of a personal nature.

How can I help them and still have time to run my business?

My company has developed a program to assist business owners and managers identify personal problems that are costing your company business.

Need to know more……

Add a comment to this blog and I will contact you to set up a time for a free workplace productivity assessment.

Cheers

Grant Herbert
The People Builder