TIPS ON BUILDING EMPLOYEE SKILLS

It is easy to be critical of employees. The goal of this advice is to provide a structured framework for hiring, managing and communicating with employees and to reinforce that what your employees achieve for and with you is a reflection of your leadership.

HEADLINES

• You hire the people who work in the business.
• You set their tasks.
• You determine the method of communication.
• You control training.
• You decide on measurement of performance.
• How you behave sets and example.
• Employee performance is on you.

GETTING THE CULTURE RIGHT

The culture of the business is a reflection of you. Get this right and people know from you what you expect of them without you having to say too much.

TRAINING.

Take training people seriously.

Have a training plan for every new employee. This plan needs to be structured with evaluations built in to ensure they have learnt.

Use other resources such as free training from suppliers and your software company.

Pay for appropriate training such as a short course in Visual Merchandising.

Look upon training as on-going, not only for new employees.

No training sets you and employees up to fail.

DELEGATION

Any time you delegate a task, explain the goal of the task and allocate an amount of time to spend on the task. Here are three examples:

1. Please create a display for this Easter product. Set it up here. Make it appealing to families. I have allocated an hour to setup the display. The measure of success: selling out prior to Easter.
2. Please refresh the plush display by taking everything off the shelves and spinners, cleaning them and rebuilding the display so it looks completely different to what is there. How different is entirely up to you. You can have an hour to get this job done. The measure of success: a noticeable bump in sales.
3. I am making you responsible for expanding our range of pop culture products. Look at the newsXpress suppliers. You have a budget of $1,000 to spend on anything you want. Use the newsXpress experts for guidance. You order the stock, price it, display it, train all other staff and reorder as it sells down. The measure of success: getting $1,000 in sales within six weeks of the stock arriving in store. A secondary measure of success: reordering within the overall $1,000 budget to maintain stock and maintain success.

Any time you delegate, you give permission to succeed and to fail. Too often the delegator focuses on failure when the focus ought to be on what was learned from the failure.

If you delegate and they fail and learn nothing then the delegation has been a waste. If you delegate and they fail, learn and improve then progress has been made and you can expect more next time.

Delegation is all about giving them freedom. However, it is important you ensure they have all the information and the necessary skills to be successful at what you have delegated.  This is on you.

IN MANAGING A DEPARTMENT

Set goals for the department over time – say, 3, 6 or 12 months. Allocate space. Set a total inventory budget. Set them free. The fewer restrictions you place the greater the opportunity for them to help grow the business through what they manage.

The key is to not micro manage them. You either given them authority over the department or not.

Department managers need to have authority when dealing with others on matters relating to their department – even the owner of the business.

In considering delegating authority for a department, ask for a pitch, a plan for what they would do and why and how. Ask them for a budget. Get them thinking like business people. They have to show you they want the responsibility and are prepared to put in the business work to justify you giving them the authority.

Choose wisely.

COMMUNICATION

1. Keep it simple.
2. Goal oriented.
3. To facilitate assessment of performance.
4. Must be two-way.

Setup a communication book, one place, where day to day tasks are noted, tasks outside those set for a shift or a role.

The communication book should be read by everyone.

Number each point.

Keep notes brief, goal-focused and on topic. No essays. Use punctuation.

If you need to admonish an employee, do it with respect, privately and leave them with a clear understanding of what to do next time.

IF YOU THINK YOU ARE BETTER OFF DOING THINGS YOURSELF

This is not an uncommon thought if something has not been done exactly as you would have done it.

Our advice is to resist this.

You cannot do everything. This is why you delegate.

Let it go. Let people do their best.  If their best is not what you want or need, help them get better but do not do it yourself as doing so will deny them the opportunity to develop and take your mind of what is more important to you and your role in the business.