5 Rules for Successful Communication With Your Employees

Successful management requires skills of working with people. The way you manage your relationships with your employees is important for your team’s productivity. People are different, they are motivated and demotivated with different approaches. Understanding which approach is the best for a certain situation doesn’t come at once, but it’s something you can learn with experience and critical thinking.

Many employees aren’t satisfied with the feedback they receive from their bosses. Some people need to hear how important they are for the company. Others can’t be productive with an emotional style of management. How to maintain a friendly psychological atmosphere in a big team of different people?

What Do People Need to Know?
Each employee needs feedback from a manager to understand and evaluate the quality of his or her work. Am I doing it right? Does anyone see my progress? How valuable is my work? If an employee lacks answers to this question, he or she can’t see the guidance and lacks motivation as a result.

The rules below will help you understand how to give your employees a clear message related to his or her work without emotions, insults or anything that can be taken personally. However, being too reserved is also not a good idea. This creates tension and stress between your employees.

This is what’s important when you’re giving feedback:
1. Promptness of your remarks
If your employee has done a mistake or completed a task successfully, he or she should know it at once. Don’t say “Remember the mistake in tax preparation you’ve done a month ago?” Your reaction should be immediate and if the mistake won’t be repeated, don’t discuss it anymore.
2. No generalization
If you need to make a remark about poor performance or behavior of your employee, don’t say “You always do this and that”. Discuss each situation and ask why did it happen. And remember that you should speak negatively about the fact and not about the person.
3. Using facts you notice yourself
Be attentive to employees to notice their success and drawbacks and speak for yourself. Employees should know that you are involved. This will let them understand that it’s important for you and that you are attentive to them.
4. Be the one who cares
If you notice that something goes wrong, don’t act like an aggressive accuser. Let a person explain why it happened. If you’ve noticed that an employee makes the same mistakes all the time, ask if everything is alright and mention that you care about this person. Be the one to whom people won’t be afraid to share their problems.
5. Praise people in front of others
This will help them lift their self-esteem and motivate them to work better. They will feel like valuable members of your team. But this doesn’t concern the opposite situation. If you want to discuss your employee’s drawbacks, never do it in front of others! This is a conversation that should only be between you and this employee with no witnesses.

These are universal tips that will help you be humble and tactful with any employee, no matter what kind of person he or she is.