STEP FIVE: MANAGE PEOPLE
Most business owners find dealing with staffing issues and managing people the most difficult part of running a business. Managing people is not simply 'people skills'. Employing people means using them for your own gain which instantly creates power tensions. On one hand the worker is dependent on the employer to provide their means of livelihood; on the other. the employer must trust the worker to do nothing that deliberately or inadvertently damages the employer's business. If one side misuses their power. the interdependency can become unbalanced. dysfunctional. manipulative or unhealthily dependent.
Managing people so that they are committed to the goals of your business is not going to be achieved by treating people as 'human resources' which is really just another way of saying 'breathing machinery'. Reducing people to 'human resources' makes it easier to see them as a means to an end and much of employment-related legislation is aimed at controlling how this may occur.
More importantly. 'human resources' is neither positive nor respectful. It is no surprise that in the fifty or more years that this has been the approach. despite all the efforts to improve motivation and leadership. productivity and performance. the experts are still trying to figure out how to influence better employee results.
Employee engagement is about managing people and their contributions. not creating a relationship in which one party is treated as subordinate then somehow cajoled into being happy about it. In fact much of the human resources approach is spent righting out the imbalance of the employment relationship that it created in the first place. It is probably the very environment you chose to escape when you set up your own business.
The inherent difficuLties of a reLationship where power is either ambiguous or out of balance and the convoluted processes used to control and motivate people often encourages employers to avoid dealing with people. particularly when they have a potentially sensitive situation to resoLve. SmaLL businesses cannot afford the time or cost of managing unnecessarily complicated relationships and a dispute or breach of legal requirement could be enough to decimate the business.
Managing people assumes that it is not their labour that matters. it is their belief in. support of. commitment and contributions to your organisation and what it stands for that is valuable. If this is present. the labour will follow; and not in a mechanical. programmed tasks kind of way. but with a thoughtful. objective-oriented approach. If the expectation for high performance is accessible to all employees and the barriers (not standards) to achievement are removed. then employees become willing to work on your vision as hard as you do.
Getting the people management right not only makes good business sense from a cost perspective, but it is essential for the long term success of the organisation.
Many managers worry that if they remove the stop signs that restrict workers from straying out of their designated area that chaos will reign. people will take liberties. people will fight for the choice jobs and managers will Lose controL. They manage for the worst and are then disappointed if not resentful when people respond in kind to that environment. This is why getting your story right is so important. If your story is genuine. meaningful and present. it regulates employee performance just as effectiveLy as any other written rul