For techies like me, coding and managing technology tools is the easiest part of work. People management for me happens through a lot of mistakes and learning. The one thing that separates techies from pure-people managers is the on-the-ground reality. At the end of the day, only techie managers can measure the productivity of their employees, while improving employee wellness can be done through processes.
Manager-Reportee Employee Relations
Always use a data-driven approach while dealing with employee relations. Opt for tools that will help get anonymous feedback from employees on a timely basis. Also make it transparent to the employees that the feedback is anonymous. Creating the right employee experience is difficult. It is even harder in remote and hybrid work settings. Moreover, annual engagement surveys look at the past year and leave unanswered questions. By the time managers can react to the feedback, the data is already stale.
Enable your employees to be lifelong learners by challenging them
Develop your managers into highly capable people leaders
Align your workforce toward the shared organizational values
Drive meaningful employee experiences through personalized interventions backed by data and insights
Appreciate your teams by introducing fun into every day
Appreciate small and big actions alike
Reinforce your own values through peer recognition
Design and execute reward and recognition strategies to drive essential behaviors and outcomes
Remove friction points that cause employees to stop giving feedback
Collect employee feedback in the form of their natural experiences rather than a scale of 1–5
Enable feedback collection on platforms your teams use such as Slack, MS Teams, Google, or email
Make the entire organization part of the change process
Promotions and Remuneration
This section is a detailed analysis of how an employee appraisal system could look. Ideally, everyone at the company will go through this process.
- Same designation: The employee will continue to work in the same role. The criteria for the appraisal would be:
Performance (based on review process)
- Same category but different designation: The employee gets a different designation but continues to be in the same category. The criteria for the appraisal would be:
Performance (based on review process)
Designation change increment % (+x%)
- Across category: The employee gets an opportunity to work in a different category, and there is a change in designation and role as well. The criteria for the appraisal would be similar to what is depicted in Figure 6-1:
Performance (based on review process)
Category shift increment % (+x%)
A text box titled we will have 3 categories where each one falls into categories 1, 2, and 3. Category 1 lists individual contributor, associate software engineer, and software engineer. Category 2 lists team management, associate tech lead, and tech lead. Category 3 lists leadership, senior tech lead, and engineering manager.
Sample categories
Having such a structure helps people strive toward the higher categories. It also ensures fair promotions to those who prefer to stay as an individual contributor rather than wanting to get into a management or leadership role. Transparency with promotions and remuneration always helps in building a healthy workplace environment.
Summary
The workplace experience in the post-COVID world has been ever evolving. Effective employee relationships can be achieved only if we connect with the employees in a productive manner by setting up the right processes. We need to ensure that timely recognition, promotions, appraisals are given. Productive employees are happy about the work-environment created not just because of the work that they are doing, but also because they are being cared for. This care will prove to be effective by the processes we set up. And the care gets multiplied if the processes we setup is transparent to the employees.