Tips for Successfully Managing Your Very First Employee (Part 2)

By: Dave Kramer Wednesday June 22, 2016 comments Tags: employees, business management

Ready to hire your very first employee? If so, congratulations! There’s no other business growth milestone quite like it. Prepare yourself for a whole new set of challenges, but if you can learn to manage your first employee effectively, you’ll be in a great position to continue growing your team and your business!

Management doesn’t always come easily, but I maintain that anyone can learn how to do it. In Part 1 of this post (click here to read), I shared 6 tips to help ensure your new employee will actually save you time, rather than becoming needy.

In Part 2, I’ll share my tips for helping your employee grow as a confident, productive member of your team, as well as what to do if you eventually lose them.

Clarify Processes, Policies, & Procedures

The key to success in a growing business is organization. As a solopreneur, you undoubtedly had tons of systems and processes in place to ensure that priorities got tackled, tasks didn’t fall through the cracks, and your time was used efficiently. Now it’s time to scale that up. Your new employee needs all the information you have to follow processes and procedures, especially if they're a remote employee. Managing remote employees may be daunting, and organization is key.

Before your employee’s first day, spend some time thinking about your systems and processes. Which ones work really well? Which ones need a revisit? Which ones work well when it’s just you, but will fall apart when more people are added? Do all you can to ensure your processes are air airtight and well-documented.

When your new employee starts, you’ll inevitably find problems with your company processes, but the better-prepared you are, the fewer walls you should hit. Also, if all your processes are well-documented, it’ll be easier to figure out where a problem starts and ends.

Having these processes laid out clearly will also help encourage your employees to document their actions in a day. As a manager, the better your employees’ work is documented, the less time you have to spend getting status updates in one-on-one meetings and the more time you can spend being proactive about growing the business together.

Have employees track their time, even if they aren’t paid hourly. This will help you to understand and better manage where employee time is being spent. We also recommend having your employees document all interactions with customers, progress on tasks, and, of course, any sales they make.

AllProWebTools makes it easy for your employees to leave this kind of documentation, through a tool called the Workflow Timeline. This live feed of all your business’s updates is ideal for ensuring your employees and your business as a whole are on track, all at a glance. Managing remote employees and solidifying processes for them is a breeze with the Workflow Timeline. Click here to learn more about the Workflow Timeline.

Plan Their First Successes

Nothing boosts confidence like success, and confident employees are vastly more valuable to a small business than timid ones. Confident employees will be able to direct themselves, make important decisions, and lend charisma to your business. So it’s crucial to give new employees a taste of success as soon as possible.

Have some assignments ready for them that you know they’ll be able to complete on their first day, and devote a significant amount of time to discussing your and their goals for the position. As much as possible, avoid having the first day be a day full of unimportant “busy-work.” Instead, an “engagement-heavy” first day, where your new employee works on meaningful tasks, will instill much more confidence.

I can’t express enough how much AllProWebTools enables this. First of all, the tasking system makes it easy for you to have a number of pre-loaded “success generator” tasks in their console, which they can work on whenever they have time. Second, the system encourages employees to self-learn and self-direct, again boosting confidence. Whether you're managing remote employees or in-office employees, the tasking system is the best way to encourage and motivate your team.

Unchain From the Office

If you chose your new hire carefully and implement the tips from this blog post, as well as Part 1, you’ll quickly develop a self-sufficient, empowered, confident employee. Once you’ve built some trust, you might be able to get even more productivity out of your employee by allowing them to incorporate some flexibility into their scheduling.

Allowing your employees to work remotely, when and where they’re most productive, has both short-term and long-term benefits.

• Take advantage of your employees’ most productive hours, even if those aren’t between 9 and 5
• Increase your odds of having employees stay with you for the long haul
• Make your team more resilient against things like flu bugs, snow days, and technical difficulties by making work from home an option on those days

Worried about managing remote employees and keeping them accountable? Try AllProWebTools, which streamlines managing remote employees and gives you insight into what your employees are working on and how long it’s taking them.

Future-Proof the Position

The unfortunate reality is, not everyone you hire will be able to stick around forever. Turnover can be a common and frustrating problem for small business owners, but you can reduce your turnover costs by investing in tools that make it easy for someone to fill the previous employee’s shoes.

As a lifelong small business owner, I’ve seen my fair share of turnover, and I’ve built AllProWebTools in such a way as to ease the burden on the business when an employee leaves. If your previous employee made good use of AllProWebTools, documenting how their time was spent, their relationships with clients, and their progress on projects, it’s easy for a new hire to begin filling in. The new employee can pick up right where the previous left off.

Obviously your employees won’t be replaceable cogs in a machine, but you’ll at least be able to have good documentation of the hole you need to fill!

Even if your employee leaves on less-than-ideal terms, you won’t have to worry so much about security. By simply deactivating the employee’s user account in AllProWebTools, you revoke their access to the information stored in your console. Our Password Manager even allows you to easily change the passwords of any other accounts that employee had access to. Learn more about the password manager here.

Losing an employee is never easy, but AllProWebTools ensures that you don’t lose all the information, leads, and projects they were working on along with them! Documentation is key to developing confident, empowered employees, from onboarding to exit interview, which is why we recommend using a tool like AllProWebTools as the central hub of your business’s communication.

Has AllProWebTools helped you manage your employees more effectively? Let us know in the comments