Is it time you reassessed the roles that you give your employees? While your employees may have specific job titles, such a job title may involve a variety of duties. Some of these duties could be better delegated to certain employees than others. For instance, in a restaurant, you may have employees that are better suited to running food to customers and others that are better at serving drinks. By delegating roles to the right people, you could create a more efficient and happier team. Below are just a few tips on matching roles to your employees.
Assess what your employees are good at
Different employees are likely to have different skills and maybe they’re better at certain roles as a result. Some employees may be better at communicating with people than others and maybe better in customer-facing roles. Others may have more practical skills and may be better at handling the jobs behind the scenes. There may even be specific tasks that employees are good at which you can take advantage of. At a marketing firm, for instance, you may find that one employee is very good at writing press releases and that another employee is really good at coming up with social media content ideas. Take advantage of your employees’ strengths in order to make your business as successful as it can be.
Find out which tasks your employees enjoy
You should also consider the tasks that employees want to do. In many cases, the tasks that we are good at are the tasks we want to do, but this is not always the case. Just because one of your chefs is very fast at washing dishes doesn’t necessarily mean that they enjoy this task - make sure that less desirable tasks are fairly shared out among your employees. As for the tasks that all of your employees want to do, try to share these out too - especially if they were part of an employee’s job description when applying (so long as they’re not completely hopeless at that role, in which case you may have to arrange a serious discussion with them in which you discuss what is best for the company).
Ask your employees to take a personality test
A career assessment test could help to reveal your employees’ personality types and the roles that are suited to these types. It could also teach you skills on how to better manage individual employees by understanding what motivates individual employees and keeps them productive. You can find these tests online. Consider asking your employees to take a test.
Consider cross-training employees
Sometimes it could be worth cross-training employees if you feel that their skills could be better used elsewhere. For instance, you may have an employee working in HR who shows great persuasive skills that could be better suited to a sales role. When doing this, you need to be sure that this is what your employees actually want to do - some employees may have no desire to train in another area if it was not part of their job description when applying. In some cases, it could be worth training employees in multiple areas just so that you can cover certain roles when people are away. When training up a manager, cross-training could also sometimes have advantages.
