Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Keys to Effectively Managing Employee Performance. This is the next topic in the 2022 Deer Oaks Supervisor Excellence Webinar series. I'm Greg Brannan from Deer Oaks. Good to be with you today.

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Let's go ahead and get started, folks. So let's talk about when we start talking about employee performance management, managing employee performance, there's a couple prerequisites that set us up for greater success. One is strengthening manager-employee relationships. And I know I'm preaching to the choir about this. But folks, when we're proactive about this, when we see spending time with our employees, connecting with them, showing interest in their world, showing that you care about them as people and not just as employees, that you're regularly you supportive and interacting with them and enjoying spending time with them, they'll feel valued and cared about.

And when that happens, they're going to be much more apt to be fully engaged and give their best effort. The Carnegie training company, they researched employee engagement. And they were looking for what is that game changer? What is that one thing that determines whether or not an employee's going to get fully engaged and give you their best effort?

And they found that having a caring manager is that magic bullet. That if somebody believes that my manager cares about me as a person, I am much more likely to get fully engaged and do my best work. I got to tell you. I've been at Deer Oaks going on 11 years now. And I work for a really great supervisor. She's our executive director.

And she really takes time to spend time with all of us, really lets us that she cares about us as people. She asks us about our families. I really enjoy working for her. And because she does such a great job-- and it's not just she does a great job of leading me in the work that I do, which she does. But she also does a really great job of building a great relationship with me.

I feel cared about by her. At the beginning of all of our meetings, she's always asking how my family is, my grandchildren, my wife. She knows the kinds of things I'm interested in and follows up and asks me how things are going. And then she also makes me feel very included and cared about in terms of the work that we do together.

And because of that, I'm very motivated. I really enjoy my work here at Deer Oaks. And she gets a lot of credit for it. She does a really great job of leading me. And again, I feel very cared about and valued as an employee and as a human being by her. And as a result, I'm totally motivated to give my best effort every day.

And so let's not forget that. Let's not take for granted that-- and we can always improve in this area, right? We can always spend a little bit more time with folks. We can always take a little bit more interest, value people a little bit more, be a little bit more respectful in the way we interact.

And as you do that, what's going to happen is people are going to be motivated to give you their best work. So let's remember that. And if you want to ever do a straw poll on this, let me give you a really quick one here. We'll take 30 seconds, right?

Ask you-- jot down very quickly some of the people, the first names of some of the people that report to you. And on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being you've got a great relationship with that person And 1 being you really don't have a good connection-- chances are very few of us would be that low on the score because we're all good supervisors. But I'd be interested to have you do a little straw poll with yourself, a little survey with yourself, and grade yourself on a scale of 1 to 10, with each of the people that report to you.

Give yourself a 10 with each person who you have a great relationship with or really strong connection, where because you spend a lot of time with this person and how you interact with them that they know you care about them as a person. They know you really value their contributions. And it's really going well. The relationship is really strong.

But probably many of us will have scores a little bit less than 10, right? I still do. I haven't arrived yet. I've got three direct reports on my team at Deer Oaks. And I wouldn't say I have a 10 in any of those three relationships.

I've been working on improving them over the years. But if your score is seven or eight or six in one of those relationships, just use that as kind of a reset to think, OK, what can I do in my relationship with this staff person to strengthen it a little bit more?

Do I need to spend more time with them? Do I need to demonstrate a little bit more by maybe asking more about what's going on in their world instead of just being all always about business when we interact? Just do what you can do to try to strengthen that relationship so that that employee will feel more cared about by you. And at the end of the day, the more cared about they feel by you, the more effort and the more motivated they'll be to do their best work.

The next prerequisite that's going to drive employee motivation is whether or not you partner with them on the work. And it's interesting because a lot of times supervisors see themselves as sort of dictating work. And this was a mistake I made early in my supervisory career is I was very task oriented. And I would kind of dictate what people-- I would assign work.

And of course, a supervisor, it's part of our role is to assign work. But I'd overreach. I would tell people what to do and how to do it almost to the point of micromanaging at some points. And I really had to learn how to do a better job of collaborating with employees and partnering on developing work plans instead of feeling like it was my job to dictate the work plans.

And so ask yourself, again, when you work with employees, to give assignments, to distribute the work to be done, are you the kind of a supervisor that assigns work and tells people what to do and then how to do it? Do you get really hands on in terms of how the work's going to be done? Or do you trust the employee to come up with the work plan? Do you take the approach where you're a partner or you're collaborating with them, and you're assigning the work, but you're allowing the employee to have input into how that work's going to get done?

In those interactions, when we're allowing the employee to be more hands on, to show them respect for their capabilities and their ideas, to value their input, those employees typically are going to feel more respected and valued, which leads, again, to higher levels of engagement and typically better performance. Now, of course, we need to proactively coach performance, right? And sometimes we as supervisors-- because we're busy people, right?

Every most of us nowadays are working supervisors, right? We're not sitting in an office and just kind of administering. We're also working. We're hands on. I mean, that's the way of the world nowadays.

And so we want to think about proactively coaching performance. So rather than just letting things slide and waiting until there's some sort of an issue before we step in, what I mean by proactively coaching performance is to be thinking on a regular basis of incrementally working with people, partnering with them to incrementally get higher levels of productivity. Because, of course, at the end of the day, part of our role is a supervisor is to maximize the productivity of our employees and of our team.

And so now the national statistics on employee engagement and motivation-- I wanted to share this. This is from Gallup, the polling company. Nationally-- and this is non-supervisory employees-- the research in general is that 25% of employees-- now, this is across the world-- or excuse me, across the country, all industries, public and private. 25% in general are what's called engaged. They come to work wanting to give 100%. And of course, as we talked about, their relationship with their supervisor is a big part of that.

At the other end, 20% are what's called actively disengaged. They are watching the clock, doing the minimum. They're not particularly interested in doing their best work. They're just trying to get by. And then the middle part, the 55% there in that middle bullet on the slide that's up there now, those are the folks that could go in either direction, depending on what's happening on a given day, how they're feeling about their relationship with their boss, whether the work they're doing at the time is interesting or not, how motivated they are at that particular point in time.

And so I want us to recognize that by proactively coaching performance, which means regularly meeting with people, talking about the work product, talking about the work that's in process, the current projects, talking about performance in general. That when we more regularly proactively coach people's performance-- I'm going to talk about some structure around that here in a moment-- typically you can see even the most engaged people, the 25% that tend to be pretty engaged, get even more engaged, be willing to give even more discretionary effort. And then the 55% in the middle, they'll tend to be more engaged if their supervisor is more proactively working with them.

And even the actively disengaged folks will step up a little bit and give a little bit more effort if we're proactively coaching them. And so that's what I want to talk to you about today is how proactively having collaborative coaching conversations with employees-- and either I'm following up on assignments or just generally coaching them in areas of their overall responsibility-- can lead to maximizing productivity. So this is taking more of a proactive approach.

From my way of looking at things, it starts with having a dependable communication process. Again, if you are more reactive as a supervisor-- and I have been many times in my career. I've been more reactive where if something wasn't broken, I didn't think I needed to fix it.

So for example, I wasn't-- back maybe 15, 20 years ago-- I've been managing people now for about 28 years. 15, 20 years ago, I wasn't necessarily always being proactive. And I had some big teams over the years. And I had as many as-- I'm thinking, what-- 14 or 15 direct reports at any one given time. So that's a big team. I know a lot of you have had big teams like that.

I wasn't as proactive as I could have been. So basically I was trying to do the best I could in general. But then I was more reactive to responding to what wasn't working. And so I wasn't having regular conversations with people to try to coach them to go from good to great or to go from average to good or to go from maybe low performing to at least being adequate, at least adequately performing, like I talked about a minute ago, what you can do when you're being more proactive in your coaching approach.

And so part of that was I did not have, back in those days, a dependable communication structure. So I really was meeting and talking with people on an needed-basis, which leads to being more reactive. But I came to realize that when you have regular one-on-one meetings with staff-- I want to talk about that here for a minute.

When you have regular one-on-one meetings with staff-- there's a lot of research. Gallup is one company, again, that did some research on one-on-one structure meetings with supervisors-- is that employees that have regularly structured one-on-one meetings-- now, it doesn't matter how often. If you have a big team, maybe you don't do it every week. Maybe you do it every other week or once a month.

But I've got three direct reports now. So I can do it once a week. I can have weekly conversations with the team. And so because of having weekly conversations with the team, I can be more proactive. I can stay on top of things that are-- projects that are in process, right?

I can follow up to see how those are how those are moving along, which can help you maximize the productivity on those projects and the quality of that work. I can do a lot more encouraging of staff, give them a lot more recognition, show a lot more appreciation for their contributions more regularly, which, again, is the kind of behavior from supervisors-- and oh, we all know that-- that motivates people to do even better work. When people feel appreciated and valued and they feel cared about, again they're going to be much more likely to do their best work.

And before I was doing regular one-on-one meetings, I was, again, being reactive. I wasn't having enough quality conversations with people around the work in process or checking on the progress of the work to ensure that the work was being done at the highest level of productivity and the highest quality possible. And so a while back, several years ago, I decided to start implementing one-on-one meetings. And I actually learned that from a boss that I used to have in the early 2000s before I came to work for Deer Oaks.

She had regular meetings with me once a week. I got a half an hour with her every week. And not only did it feel great to have that dedicated time. But she had a really good knack of staying in touch with me, showing an interest in my life, which made me feel regularly cared about.

And then she would regularly follow up on projects and processes that were moving forward. Plus, she would initiate conversation on new possibilities that we could add to the mix, new opportunities or new tasks that needed to be completed. And because of that process, she really got the best out of me. And I really took my productivity to a higher level.

So when I came to work for Deer Oaks, my supervisor does a great job here at Deer Oaks. She does the same thing with me. So we have regular one-on-one meetings. And I've continued to really thrive in that environment to the point where I started-- many years ago, I started doing one-on-one meetings with my staff.

And it's really made all the difference in the world. When you have those structured meetings, it's like a placeholder. You don't have to be reactive. You don't have to find a special time to meet to follow up on a project that's in process. You just have to just to-- like, for example, with one of my key employees, we meet every Thursday afternoon.

I will put some notes under my meeting-- in my calendar for my meeting with her on a Thursday afternoon. I'll put notes to remind me to follow up on different work that's in play or different items that I need to follow up with her around or something new I want her to get started on. I'll plug that into those Thursday afternoon meeting agendas, right? It helps me to be proactive and it keeps me from needing to just be reactive or to create a one-off meeting about something that I'm concerned about.

So, like, for example, even if I'm thinking from week to week, hey, I wonder how she's doing with this or that, I don't have to send an email, which it could feel to her like I'm looking over her shoulder. Or I don't have to create a one-off meeting in a reactive way because I'm going to meet with her later that week on Thursday afternoon. So I just use those weekly meetings to keep the process moving.

It helps me stay proactive, again, helps me continue to reinforce the quality of the relationship with her and with the rest of the team when I do one-on-one meetings with them as well, of course. And it really helps us to maximize the productivity of the work we're doing together. So that's what I really recommend. If you're not doing regular one-on-one meetings right now, you might consider it again.

And you don't have to do it every week. Especially if you have a bigger team, it might be hard to do a one-on-one meeting every week. But if you do it every other week or maybe once a month, would be fine as well. It at least can help you stay on the same page together and can give you the structure to follow up and make sure that the work is being done to the highest possible level.

Next let me take you through a performance management model that's from the world of project management. So some of you might recognize this. But again, at its essence, it talks about performance management is a process. It's not an event.

Some people see performance management as the annual review. And obviously that's a reactive way to see that, right? Because if you're not coaching along the way-- you're not coaching employees along the way, having good follow up conversation, seeing how things are going, giving input into the process, holding people accountable to make sure things are being done well enough and on time-- you miss an opportunity to maximize productivity along the way. Plus you miss an opportunity to strengthen that relationship and create more motivation, which again can encourage an employee to do their best work.

And so I want us to make sure we see performance management as an ongoing process. And it starts with collaboration on goals and plans. As I mentioned earlier, when we're working with employees and assigning work, let's make sure we're doing it in a partnership.

So don't feel like you're the one assigning the work. You're telling the employee what to do and how to do it. That can make an employee feel like they're being micromanaged. We want to collaborate on goals and plans for the work. So, sure, it's your responsibility as the supervisor to make suggestions about what should be done or to make assignments of work, the what and the why, right? Here's what I need you to do and here's why. And here's why I think you'll do a good job with it.

But when you collaborate on that-- I'm, going to come back to this slide. So when you collaborate on that and you ask the employee for their input into the goals of the project, into the work plan, that does a couple of wonderful things. Number one, it helps the employee to take ownership and buy in. If you give them input into how the work's going to be done and what the goals are for the work, they're going to typically take more ownership. They're going to typically see it as their work or the work that they're doing together with you rather than seeing as work that you're just delegating to them.

So I think it's really important. And that's why I'm a big advocate of don't assign work via email. And I'm not talking about one-off tasks, folks. No one has time to do a separate meeting for one-off tasks. But I'm talking about any significant assignment of work, a significant task, a significant project. Make sure you do that with an employee during your one-on-one meetings, or at least do it face to face or via video chat, where you can see each other.

That's really important, folks, because you want to take your time with that. That's where the motivation starts for the project for the employee. That's where you get that buy in is to have a good collaborative conversation. Partner together on how this work's going to get done.

And show that or show the employee-- give the employee the respect and show them that you value their capabilities, you're interested in their ideas. And the more you do that on any significant project, and the more input you give them into how that work's going to get done, the more they're going to take ownership and be motivated to do that work at a high level of quality. So that's an important part for starting the process, so collaborate on goal setting and work planning.

But the second piece is make sure you have a regular follow-up communication process. Now, I just laid one out for you a few moments ago with those standing weekly meetings. I use those standing weekly meetings to do follow-up communication on projects in play. And so this would be the follow-up project.

So let's say, for example, with one of my key employees-- I'll take the example of one of my key employees I talked about a moment ago. So when I assign her work in a particular weekly meeting and we collaborate on the work plan, I'll let her what I'm going to follow up with her on it. So she knows-- she has an idea of what I'm going to be looking for from a timeline standpoint.

So I'll say, tell yow what. How about two weeks from now, I'll follow up with you, give you a little bit of time to get started on this project. And two weeks from now I'll follow up with you, and if you could please give me an update.

And that follow-up process, there's an accountability piece to that, right, folks? Because the employee knows are going to be asked about it in two weeks. And so they better have that thing started, right? Because they're going to be asked about it again. So that holds people accountable not to procrastinate and to be moving that project along. So that's one positive thing that happens.

And then during that follow-up conversation, it's a wonderful opportunity to make sure you're still on the same page about how the work's being done. You did brainstorm it a couple of weeks earlier. And now when they're giving you an update on the progress that they're making, you can make sure you're still on the same page together in terms of how that work's being done.

And if they're off track, you can make midpoint adjustments. You still have time before the deadline on that work to make a midpoint adjustment or to give some input into maybe, hey, I like what you're doing here and here. But this one piece I'm thinking might could be beefed up a little bit. What if you did these pieces that you've already done a great job with, and you added this other piece? Or we beefed up this third piece so that we can make it more specific to what our original plan was that we had talked about a couple of weeks ago would be an example of making a midpoint adjustment.

Now, you also, of course, during those follow-up conversations-- and again, I my follow-up conversations 95% of the time now take place during my regular one-on-one meeting with that staff member because again, I have that structure in place. And it works beautifully. Again, I don't have to be reactive. I can just follow up using one of those meeting times.

It gives me the opportunity to stay real efficient with that and to make it part of what we do on a regular basis. And I don't have to be reactive, and I don't have to create an extra meeting to follow up on that particular work product. And so it works really, really well. And it also doesn't make the employee feel micromanaged.

Again, if you don't have a structured follow-up process, you give an assignment of work, let's say, on the first of the month. And you tell the employee, I need this done in about a month or so. And you don't hear anything back from the employee.

And all of a sudden, you start sending follow-up emails. That can make the employee feel like you're looking over their shoulder. But if you just build in those follow-up conversations about the project or about the work into your regularly standing weekly meetings or biweekly meetings or whatever the case may be, it won't make the employee feel micromanaged. They'll see it as just part of the normal flow of work between you and them. So it works really, really well. And I have found that that's been a game changer for me to keep people on track and make sure that the work product is coming in on time and at the highest level of quality.

And then last but not least, folks I want to talk about doing a post project debrief or evaluation. It was interesting. Forbes magazine a few years ago had a magazine-- or had an article that said the post-project debrief-- I think the subtitle was-- I think it was, the missing piece of American quality assurance. And what the author was maintaining in that article was that because we're all so busy now nowadays and because so much work has turned in electronically nowadays, that we get quickly onto the next thing, and oftentimes there's no debrief period or no feedback given to the employee.

And so we just moved to the next thing and we're missing an opportunity when we don't do that debrief, right? And so what I want to talk to you about is building some of that into your performance management process. Now, obviously you're not going to have the time as a supervisor, being a busy person, especially have a big team, to do a debrief on every single submitted work product, right? No, we're not going to need to do that.

But if you can build it in periodically as a quality assurance check-- what I do, I manage a team of proposal writers-- is I periodically debrief with them on a previously submitted proposal just as a quality assurance check. Then we do it together. We do it as a partnership.

So schedule it as a collaborative review. You don't want to be scheduling it as a follow-up where you're nitpicking it, right? That can make someone feel micromanaged or overly criticized. We don't want to do that.

We want to-- first and foremost, we want to take the opportunity to give them a lot of compliments on what you liked about the work, right? It's an opportunity to provide good feedback, give them recognition, show appreciation for their work. Makes them feel good about themselves. Makes them feel valued and respected.

That's an important part of doing a debrief, or a post-project evaluation, right? But then you can address any performance issues. And so I typically-- I'll look at the work ahead of time. The employee will look at it ahead of time. And we'll circle back and have that conversation.

And I'll say, I like this and this and this and this. And I always start with a lot of positive. And I say, what did you like about it in retrospect? And I ask them to tell me what they liked about it. And then I'll ask them. I might have one thing at one or two things in the back of my mind I might want them to talk about as maybe an area for improvement.

But I ask them to go first. And I'll ask them, now, in retrospect, now that you've had a chance to come back and look at this, if you were doing the same project again, what did you see from your review of this submitted project that you would have done maybe differently? Or what did you learn from this that you could use on future projects like this? And give the employee a chance to self evaluate.

And I'll tell you, 9 times out of 10, the employee always does a really good job of saying, I noticed this, or I noticed that. I'll give you a good example of one or one of these I did with one of my employees a couple of years ago is that it was a really well-written proposal. The only thing I was going to critique about was it was kind of long. I think it was close to 100 pages.

And if you've ever you evaluated proposals, it's hard to read really, really long proposals. Again, it was very well written, though. And so I spent the first part of the evaluation telling the employee how good it was, how much I liked it. I thought it was well written. I thought the executive summary was really well laid out. I thought overall it was a really quality proposal.

And then I asked her what she thought. And then she talked about what she liked. And then I asked her, in retrospect, is there anything you would have done differently if you had a chance to do this proposal again? And before I had even a chance to say anything about my critique, she said, in retrospect, I think it was a little long. And she says, I think--

And I said, OK. I said, I observe that as well. What would you do next time to make it a little bit more concise? And she said, I think I'm going to start building in an extra edit before I submit these proposals in the future because I think it's really helpful to make them as concise as possible.

And I said, that sounds great. And so I didn't even have to really critique it, right? She critiqued her own work. And obviously people are going to be more motivated to follow up and make improvements if it's their idea.

Interestingly, for the several months after that particular meeting, I noticed that her proposals were more concise. And we started seeing even better results. But I thought it was great. So my job was just to create the opportunity by scheduling the debrief, or the evaluation, to just give the two of us a chance to review the work together and see if there's any lessons learned or things we could do different next time.

But she actually took the impetus from that conversation to make some improvements and make it even better for the future. So do that. I would highly recommend you do that from time to time. It's a great quality assurance check.

Now, make sure you're not being overly critical when you're doing the evaluations or the debriefs because that would defeat the purpose. I really think it should be 3/4 positive, maybe 1/4 constructive, critiquing. Give them a lot of compliments, a lot of positive feedback.

Don't let them be too hard on themselves. And then at the end of the day, maybe you end up with a couple of things that you the two of you agree that could be done to make this work even more effective next time around or lessons that we've learned that we might apply for the next time. But again, the bottom line, more than anything, is you want to encourage, you want to provide recognition, make people feel good about themselves, which is going to drive their motivation-- again, keep their motivation high moving forward. And at the same time, you critique a couple of issues that you could work together to enhance for the future. So it's kind of a win-win.

So that's that three-part process. And just to summarize that is we're getting to the end here again. So you start with a collaboration. So this is the way I lay it out. It works really, really well, folks.

As you collaborate together with the employee on the goals and plans for the work, you have some sort of a follow-up communication conversation in the middle. And ideally do that during some sort of a regularly scheduled meeting so it can be more proactive and less reactive. And then at the end, every once in a while, on significant work that's been submitted, do a structured debrief and evaluation in a collaborative way with the employee.

The last thing I want to talk about today, or last two things I want to talk about is addressing performance concerns and so as a part one and a part two. And so obviously if the employee's falling short, if the quality of work has been slipping, or if there's a particularly important assignment that got turned in and the work was subpar, don't ignore it. Sometimes supervisors, if it's not horrible, they just kind of let it slide.

But folks, if we avoid addressing performance concerns, silence can be perceived as permission. So for example, somebody hands on a subpar-- let's say it's a monthly report, and they hand in a subpar report. And you decide to overlook it this month. Don't be surprised if you get another subpar report next month because, again, if we don't address something, people can feel like what they submitted was fine, right? And performance can worsen.

And so during your conversation with the employee, during one of either your standing meetings with the employer or when you schedule the time to talk to the employee about that project, just be honest with them about it. Again, start with something positive. Let them know that I liked this and this and this from the work, but I thought this area and this area needed to be beefed up a little bit. And I was wondering why you didn't submit the report this month with the same charts and graphs that you normally do? I was wondering why.

And let's say the employee says, I just didn't have enough time this month. And I can follow up by saying, I can relate to that. There's sometimes when I have really busy periods where I'm not able to be comprehensive as normal. But this particular report is going to senior management. So we've got to make sure this is our best work each and every month.

And then I turn it around to them, rather than telling them what to do to fix it, I'll use it as a coaching opportunity to say, what will you do-- and what could you do next month when you turn in this report to make sure that it's back up to the quality level of the report you normally turn in, the ones at the quality level we know senior management's going to be looking for? And I let the employee come up with the performance enhancement plan. Again, if you dictate how the employee should correct a subpar work, they may not be as motivated to follow up on that because it's not their idea.

But if you ask them what they can do to improve the work, chances are they'll be more motivated to follow up because people support what they help to create. And part B of this last thing about performance management or discussing performance issues is when you're talking to somebody about something that's subpar, be less directive and more collaborative, like I just talked about a moment ago. So if you're too directive again, if you tell that employ what they did wrong and what they need to do to fix it, that can seem punitive. That can cause the employee to feel defensive.

And as I mentioned, if you get their input into what they can do to improve the work, they're going to feel less like you're slapping them on a hand, less like you're critiquing them, and more like they're working with you to improve that performance, which can feel more respectful and less difficult. It's hard to have supervisors critique our work. I think we've all experienced that over our career, right?

But if the supervisor critiques your work in a way that they give you that opportunity for input-- they let they ask you what you could do to correct this moving forward-- again, they're going to feel less like-- it's less like your conversation with them is punitive, more like it's constructive, and typically you're going to feel more respected and more and more motivated to follow up and improve that work going forward. Now, of course, if you're having any kind of a performance management conversation with someone about subpar performance, you want to make sure you document the process just so you've got that in the file in case you needed it, in case those performance issues continue over time.

Folks, I we covered a lot in a very short period of time today. So I want to open it up for questions. Folks, and so if you have any questions, please type them into the Question box in the GoToWebinar software in the upper right-hand corner of your screen.

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All right, folks, I'm starting to get questions coming in. We're getting some questions coming in, folks. These are good questions. Here's a good one. How do address personal phone use during work hours?

In terms of employee behavior and in terms of coaching employees around following work rules, if there's some sort of a formal rule in your environment about personal telephone calls during work time, obviously you have to coach that. And just in general terms, if you notice that a particular employee, even if there's no specific rule in place for that, if you notice that employees are spending an inordinate amount of work time doing personal things, making personal calls, sending personal emails, that kind of stuff, you can coach that as well. And so my recommendation when you're coaching that is to not be punitive, like we talked about a few moments ago, is to call that employee in and just have a comfortable coaching conversation, and say, hey-- and you always want to start with something positive.

You've been doing some good work in this area or this area lately. Now, I have noticed that lately you seem to be doing a lot more personal things during work hours. I wondered if there's something going on that's preoccupying you. Is everything OK?

So at first, I would start by showing some concern about the employee because maybe there's something happening that the employee is having to keep tabs on. Maybe there's a family issue or something going on that they're keeping tabs on. But let's say the employee says, no, I just try to catch up on some things, some personal things during the workday.

And you can say, no, I don't mind if you do that occasionally. But I just want you to just-- I want to let you that let's not overdo that because we do have responsibilities here in the workplace. And I'm just wondering, what would you think would be reasonable? And if you have to quote policy, quote the policy if there is a policy in place about that.

But if there isn't, you can just say, I just want to make sure that we're giving the organization its due, that we're giving 100% while we're on the job. And so what could you do moving forward to just make sure you're keeping that in balance so you're not doing too much personal things on an organizational time when we've got a lot of work to do? I we're really busy right now. And again, you want to get some confirmation from the employee that they will be more aware of that, and they'll be more responsible with that moving forward. Again, if you can allow the employee to have some input into what the go-forward plan to improve that is going to be, again, they're going to be more likely to follow through and manage that appropriately because they had some input into it.

I got a lot of great questions coming in, folks. Let me see if I can come down the list here. Here's a really good question too. So here's one of our colleagues here today that was asking the employee for some input. And the employee responded by saying, I don't know. You tell me. You're the manager.

I've had people say that to me before when I said, what do you think we should do here? What do you think the work plan should be? I've had people say that to me, I don't know. You're the boss. You tell me.

And so, folks, I always respond to something like that by saying to the employee, your opinions is important to me. You're kind of the expert here. This is your position.

You're the subject matter expert here. Plus, I don't at all I. Sure, I've got some thoughts I can share with you. And I'm happy to do that. But I don't know it all. And I would be very interested in just knowing from your perspective how you think we ought to approach this.

And typically when I use that kind of an approach, the employee will interact a little bit more. Some employees can be passive, right? And sometimes you're talking to someone who's maybe disengaged, and they're really not really-- they're not bought in. And so they're basically not interested in taking initiative. They just want to be told what to do, and they're not particularly motivated to do their best work.

But again, if you can just let them know that I don't know it all. I really would appreciate your. Input and I like to tell an employee, this is your position. You have a lot of expertise in this area. And I'd really appreciate learning from you.

And certainly you can give input as a supervisor. But you want to do your best to make sure the employee knows you're interested in their input. Because when people that you're interested in their input, that makes them feel more valued.

Even people who are relatively disengaged, if their supervisor regularly asks them for their input, they will at least feel cared about and respected a little bit more. Thank you. That was a great question.

I got lots of great questions coming in. This is awesome, folks. Here's a really, really good question is that, in the beginning, you addressed asking employees about their day, family, and interests, et cetera. And I did that. And this is our colleague saying, I did that and got told that I was being too nosy, and those kind of questions can seem to be as invading privacy.

Let me share the thinking around that And the field of leadership is continually evolving. And so the school of thought nowadays in leadership is make sure you have a good relationship with the employee, that the quality of that relationship is a driver and employee motivation, employee productivity, and employee retention. And that's really important stuff.