A guide to employment management

Employees are essential to your company’s success, so how you manage them matters. Great employment management can mean they excel at their job responsibilities, driving your business forward, and implementing good employment management processes can help them feel fulfilled and happy in their place of work.

This guide explores business employment management, why it’s important for your business and employment management strategies you can use to build a better working environment.

What is employment management, and does it matter?

Employment management refers to managing an employee from the very beginning, where you recruit, onboard and train your staff members — all the way through to developing, managing and retaining them.

Without effective employment management solutions, you risk incurring repeated recruitment costs, a bad reputation, and poor workforce morale.

Employee management strategies can help you achieve many things, including:

• Optimise performance. You can’t optimise the performance of your workforce if you don’t have a way to measure it in the first place. Employment management strategies help keep everyone on the same page, working together to achieve shared goals and KPIs.
• Improve onboarding. If you deliver a poor onboarding experience, employees can start looking elsewhere for a job. In fact, an overwhelming 80% of employees leave their jobs due to bad onboarding.
• Positively impact your bottom line. Having a real grasp of how your employees are performing and the ability to spot and fill skill set gaps can help accelerate business growth.
• Attract and retain top talent. By prioritising employee development, you can ensure employees feel valued and fulfilled in their jobs. With the best talent on board, you’re in the best position to compete with other companies. Lean more about how to attract the best employees here.
• Better manage organisational costs. Retaining good employees means you don’t have to worry about footing an unnecessary recruitment agency bill and taking time to upskill staff, which means your organisation won’t suffer the consequences of poor development.

Eight effective employment management strategies

Not all of these strategies will be relevant to your organisation; you might even already be doing most of these. Always build your employee management strategy with careful consideration so you don’t miss opportunities to improve your work environment.

Don’t forget to ask staff for ideas and suggestions to help improve your workplace; after all, they’re the ones your management techniques will affect!

1. Automate onboarding

The onboarding process includes human resources collecting relevant documentation, i.e., P45s, passport copies and bank details, and initial setup and training. It can take employees a few months to fully integrate into their new role, so consider that when building your onboarding training plans. Always ask for feedback from new starters to continue improving your onboarding experience.

P.s. Creating an internal knowledge base using employment management tools like Zen Desk or Notion can be a good idea. This can let new starters self-serve by searching for keywords and finding relevant company policies or information on requesting annual leave, for example.

2. Benchmark your salaries

If you’re paying lower than others in your industry, employees will likely go and work for your competitors instead. Paying the average salary is a basic expectation of employees, and you should deliver on that.

Benchmark salaries by collecting salary data from reliable sources such as Indeed. This gives you a starting point. When recruiting new employees, always ensure the job description aligns with other job descriptions.

3. Invest in a training platform

Many corporate training platforms are out there, with many offering extended free trials or completely free subscriptions (if your budget is tight). Remember that developing employees isn’t a choice; it should be a given. You both stand to benefit from this training.

Some training platforms to check out include:

• EduMe is perfect for training customer-facing teams for industries like hospitality and retail.
• Docebo offers a mix of instructor-led training, webinars, gamification and virtual classrooms.
• LearnUpon is a scalable learning management system offering over 400 off-the-shelf training courses, including compliance training.

4. Improve comms with collaborative systems

Collaborative software can improve team communication and help team members share and work together toward common goals. Many organisations use project management software like Notion, Slack and Monday.com to organise projects, set goals and communicate effectively across teams and departments. These tools are particularly useful if your employees work from home.

You can also use these tools to collect employee feedback anonymously, helping you detect and address problems early on and ensuring a consistently enjoyable workplace environment.

5. Build a trusting environment

Building trusting relationships with employees pays dividends, with research showing that 79% of employees are more motivated and less likely to leave their jobs if they trust their employer. And although you can’t build trust overnight, you can start building the foundations by giving employees more autonomy, which can include introducing remote work options and eliminating micromanagement.

6. Don’t forget to reward hard work

Recognition and rewards can be a great way to boost morale and foster a supportive work environment. 65% of employees surveyed said they would work harder if management noticed their contributions. So consider rewarding employees consistently, from praising the employee in front of the rest of the team to dishing out prizes or granting additional annual leave. Or let your employees choose their own reward with a cash limit!

7. Listen to your employees

If you ignore complaints or don’t act on issues raised, employees will leave or become dissatisfied and disinterested in their work, ultimately affecting their performance. If they feel overworked or stressed, take time to understand their concerns and implement solutions. Whether the solution is restructuring the team, better training management or hiring another team member to assist.

By listening to your employees, you cultivate a supportive working environment for every employee.

8. Measure employee performance

Conduct consistent employee one-on-ones to discuss progress, challenges, and short-term and longer-term goals. What do they want to improve? Are there courses you could fund to help them reach their goals? How are they currently performing?

Without measuring progress, you won’t be able to identify areas for improvement and growth. Don’t skip these meetings; although they may seem trivial, shadowed by ‘more important’ tasks, they are key to better employee management.

As the manager, it’s important you improve your skill set, too. Consider further employment management training courses to build on your already successful strategies.

To sum up

Employees need structure, the chance to grow and develop, and the right tools to do their jobs within a supportive and caring team environment. And by implementing a few consistent employment management strategies, you can simultaneously meet your employees’ expectations and achieve your business goals.

Start slow when implementing these techniques; you need to give your employees time to adapt to your new expectations.

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