One of the key roles in setting your business on the road to success or failure are your employees, and it is up to you to lead and motivate them to give their best and help you succeed.

Below are seven useful tips listed in order to achieve better employee management.

Some of these tips are compiled using academic and entrepreneur resources found online, and some are based on the methods suggested by the leading psychology experts today.

Nevertheless, the same tips will most certainly work for almost all types of businesses, regardless of their size or business environment.

Helping Employees in Time Management

One of the basic things when it comes to time management is often overlooked – the importance of keeping to-do lists and organizing them on daily basis. Sometimes it is even necessary to let the employees know that they need to finish the most important tasks on their lists first.

Meetings often consume more time than it is actually needed, and you need to make sure than only the important ones will take place, and that they will have a pre-planned agenda, will start on time and promptly finish once all the issues have been properly addressed.

One if the vital things to keep in mind is also to track working hours of your employees. There are a lot of solutions available on the market to help you track time such as Time Doctor or Hubstaff and on the long run you can have multiple benefits from this.

Setting Clear Expectations and Goals

If your employees have straightforward objectives and goals set up in front, it is much easier to keep track of their productivity, and it is also easier for them to focus on their tasks when they are fully informed of what they need to do and how to meet the expectations.

Task Delegating and Follow Ups

Setting some realistic deadlines for all upcoming tasks is as important as having reliable employees. Each time the deadlines come near a follow up should be scheduled. This is often needed if you want to manage their progress and take care of any eventual problems that could surface on time.

And if some actual problems do come by, then it would be easier to have the employees give their suggestions and insights for helping to solve them.

After the deadlines have passed it is the manager`s duty to make another follow up and give suitable feedback. If the tasks were completed with high success rates than a praise would be welcomed and very beneficial.

Giving Feedback Based on Performance

The more engaged your employees become, the more productive they will get and will sell more of your products and probably even inspire customer loyalty.

One of the most important parts of employee engagement is also the feedback that needs to be correctly implied.

It may be helpful to schedule regular employee evaluations over the year, perhaps at six month intervals, or even at three months if necessary.

These could be the most suitable to discuss employee performance, give fitting praise and set goals for all those areas that are pending improvement.

Supporting Your Employees Do Their Jobs

Providing your employees with all they need in order to become more successful is of utmost importance. Things like maintaining an up to date software, having support or available additional funding for accomplishing their goals is a big plus when it comes to managing.

If the budget is not satisfactory but needs to be respected then talk to your employees, often they know how to work within a budget and would even suggest the best time for negotiating deals with the regular suppliers.

And if an employee finds a way to cut your costs, reward them accordingly.

Regular bonuses or raises are not always possible but are certainly appreciated and need to be respected.  

Always on the Lookout For New Employees

Having great people in your team is a major asset to any business. And this particularly goes for startups. If any of the team members who are vital to your organization wish to perfect their skills and pursue a certificate or a degree in business administration, for instance, you need to stimulate them to do so. But if they are not engaged enough and their performance is not satisfactory, you need to search for potential replacements.

Finding and recruiting new people is a good move even when you have all the positions already filled. Employees come and go and you need to be ready once this happens to fill in the vacancies. And if someone is constantly under-performing it is best if you have available replacements at hand.