Business Description
When you transition from being an employee to an employer, everything changes and no amount of leadership or management courses can prepare you for what’s to come. As an employer, your responsibilities change completely and you become responsible for managing teams, optimizing business operations, and driving organisational growth.
Being an employer requires you to organise, strategize carefully, communicate effectively and be a leader. While this may seem overwhelming and challenging, following these steps will help ease the transition:
1. Set up systems and processes
As an employee, you follow what your superiors tell you and get things done. However, as an employer, the buck stops with you. Depending on how you execute your plans, you get the credit or you take the blame. As a business owner and leader, you’re responsible for mapping your business objectives and outlining strategies to achieve these objectives.
Some of the processes you must have in place is hiring talent that resonates with your organization’s vision and mission, training and career development, providing regular feedback, and setting short-term and long-term objectives for your teams, among others. You should also build a workplace that supports diversity and encourages employees to think and speak freely, continuously innovate, and solve problems.
2. Manage expectations
When you’re an employer, you’re responsible for managing the expectations of your employees. This can include career paths, promotions, performance bonuses, adequate compensation, or insurance. Understand what motivates your employees to work for you right from the beginning to avoid any misunderstandings.
Recognise their achievements, create opportunities for your employees to be creative and innovative, and give them more flexibility at work so that they have a better work-life balance.
3. Delegate tasks
Most employers tend to centralise all tasks and don’t delegate. While you may feel that it’s faster to do a job yourself rather than assigning it to someone else, resist the urge and instead, invest some time and effort in training your employees. Share your knowledge and expertise with your employees and help them get better at their jobs.
Another tendency employers have is micromanaging by keeping constant tabs on their employees. Instead, set up processes to get regular updates from your employees and trust them to do their jobs. While you’re responsible for everything, it doesn’t matter who does the work or how they do it.
4. Maintain transparency
According to the co-founder of Infosys NR Narayana Murthy, employers must create an ambience that fosters creativity, openness, meritocracy, and transparency. Such employers gain the respect and trust of their employees and build organisations that grow, scale, thrive and succeed.
We live in an age where customers want to work with transparent businesses, and people want to work for organisations that greatly value transparency and communication. Transparency is one of the main reasons why several professionals, especially millennials and generation Z choose startups over corporations.
Share updates on how your business is performing in the market, what your customers are saying about you, how you plan to improve your business and the workplace, among others to keep your employees, customers and stakeholders, informed and engaged.
5. Accept responsibility for other people’s lives
When you’re an employee, you don’t have to consider the long-term consequences of your actions, nor do you have to worry about how your organisation is performing or whether or not to hire or fire people.This changes when you’re an employer and all your actions have consequences that can affect the lives and welfare of your employees.
Any mistakes you make can directly impact their paychecks, even leading to lay offs that can devastate their families. While sometimes these circumstances cannot be controlled, planning your talent acquisition and management strategies can help you do justice by your employees and deliver your promises. Nothing’s worse than firing good employees just because you made a mistake.
Final Words
As an employer, every action, comment, and decision you make will have consequences. As an employee, you might have gotten things done and received accolades on your performance. However, as an employer, what matters the most is how you inspire other people to get things done and hit massive targets that drive business growth.
Steve Jobs believed that great things aren’t achieved by individuals, but by teams. As an employer, you must live by this principle and change your mindset from a worker to a business owner to be a successful employer.
SILA along with its Facility Management services, Turnkey Interior Contracting, and Project Management has launched its new vertical SILA Engage which is one of the employee engagement companies in Mumbai.
