Trusting Employees to Know Their Jobs

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Below are two great reads culled from this week’s crop of articles in Google Reader.  Each article examines the realities of trusting knowledge workers.  Once people’s jobs stop being completely dependent on churning out tangible products all day, there is a lot of leeway in terms of how employees can best make user of their time in the office.

Do you look over your employees’ shoulders all day, wondering what profits they’re generating with each minute at the desk?  Don’t think like that.  You hire them for their intelligence, their creativity, and the experiences they bring to the job.  If you insist employees think exclusively about your deliverables for 40 hours a week, they aren’t going to be learning and growing.

Putting Blinders on to Enhance Productivity
(Mary Abraham, Above and Beyond KM)

… instead of micromanaging employees to make them work, just articulate clear expectations and performance goals, provide great tools, and then set them free to work as they see fit. Don’t shy away from web 2.0 technology simply because you are concerned about the social aspects of the tools. When you try to put blinders on your people, you fail.

Moving Team Members from Being Controlled to Taking Initiative
(Johanna Rothman, Managing Product Development)

And if you’ve hired people with little initiative (hard to believe, but possible), explain what you need, ask for results, and back off for a while. Let people learn how to take initiative. There’s a reason it’s called “take initiative “and not “give initiative.”

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