You might have begun your business as a one-person operation, but once success comes your way, you’ll soon find that it can be highly beneficial to bring other people on board to your team. However, it’s not as if this is just a matter of hiring a person to do a job, and letting them get on with it. As soon as you bring your first employee on board, you’ll find yourself in the role of ‘manager,’ and that’s not always as straightforward as newcomers to the game would like it to be. By the time you have a team of employees, you’ll need to work hard to ensure that things run smoothly. Below, we take a look at a few useful tips that’ll make managing your team more straightforward.

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Hire Competent People

You’ll find it infinitely easier to manage your team of employees if they’re high-quality to begin with. It’s like cooking: you’ll make a much nicer meal if you’re using fresh, quality ingredients, rather than whatever has been left on the shelf. So before you do anything, take a look at your hiring process, and see how set up it is to bring excellent staff on board. Many new employers end up hurting themselves by writing job descriptions that only appeal to the bottom of the barrel candidates. Improve your hiring process, hire better staff, and make things easier for yourself.

And People You Like

You’ll fundamentally have a professional relationship with your staff, but it is important that you get along with them, and especially so if you’re a small team. That’s why it’s important to look beyond the CV, and think about how you will click with the other person. You’re going to be working closely with them each day; it’ll help considerably if you don’t have to overlook their personality just to get your job done. Of course, this doesn’t mean figuring out if you have the capacity to be best friends with them — it’s just about listening to any instincts that tell you that you might find them annoying.

Software Tools

You’ll soon find that managing involves much more than just telling your team members what to do, and then basking in all their hard work. Having employees means taking on a lot of additional tasks, such as payroll, scheduling, and so on. You can make handling these tasks much more straightforward by getting the right software tools. For example, there is software that allows you to easily track employee hours, which can help considerably when it comes to payroll processing. Downloading the tools that you need will take some of the stress out of managing a team, and also free up your time, so you can focus on the tasks that’ll help to push your business forward.

Team Building

Studies have shown that productivity goes up when people like their work colleagues and their office environment. But really, this is something that you could have guessed without a study saying that it’s the case. You can just feel that there’s a good atmosphere in the office when colleagues like each other. Plus, if people are friendly with one another, there’ll be reduced risk of disagreements and arguments from occurring. If you’ve hired well, then you should have a team of staff who are ready to be friends — but it won’t happen automatically. You’ll need to create the settings that allow people to get to know one another. One option is to host afterwork drinks on Friday evenings, or you could organise a team building trip somewhere fun (such as paintballing or go-karting).

Keep Things Tight

It’s important to remember that it’s not as if you need to hire for every task that has to be taken care of. Indeed, it’s recommended that you don’t do this, since the more staff you bring on board, the more complicated things will become. It’ll be much better if you only hire for the absolute essential tasks, and then outsource the ones that you only require essentially. For example, you probably don’t need a full-time marketing employee, so instead, you can outsource the task to a third-party company.

Give and Receive

Finally, remember that you can make things more straightforward by simply being fair with your staff. You can ask for the world from your employees if you’re also willing to give them the world. This will help prevent resentment from creeping in, which can have a hugely detrimental impact on the overall atmosphere and productivity in the office.