Translation Company | Document Translations | Localization Services | Professional Translations | Polish Translations | Translation Companies

And here is the next part for your reading enjoyment….

Learn to Trust

Ok, so it’s one thing to get members of your team to respect one another, but how do you make sure they do their jobs properly. For me, less is more here. Often companies come up with all sorts of performance measures in order to make sure that employees are working as hard as they should be. I have never been a big fan of this management style. If you create a system, people will naturally spend their time trying to figure out how to get around it. The main concern such “system” managers have is that employees will be lazy, that they won’t do what is needed without being controlled somehow. These managers flat out don’t trust the people who report to them. If you are such a manager, I recommend that you take a blind leap of faith and just try trusting your people. You’ll be amazed at what you can achieve. Obviously you can’t just give them the keys to the castle and tell them to get on with it. So let me try to clarify what I am talking about. I think providing employees as much freedom as possible to make decisions about their job can work wonders. Involve your people in the key decisions that affect their work. The goal should be for people to come up with ideas about their work and then implement these ideas. It’s amazing what ownership of an idea or plan does for motivation. I believe that if you have good people, you just need to guide them, let them find the best way themselves. They will be far more motivated and will work much harder if they feel they have participated in a decision rather than being told what to do.

One disclaimer here is that this only works if you employ good solid employees. I am not saying it works for all people, for some, control may be necessary, but HR best practice is beyond the scope of this article.

At Argos we’ve gone the route of trusting employees and, so far, I think that it has worked out well. I believe that there is an unspoken deal at Argos. Employees are expected to work hard and get the job done, which means staying late and doing everything they need to do to make sure they get our projects back to our clients in as timely a fashion as possible and with as few errors as possible. The flip side of The Deal is that when there is less work, we understand that they may need to take care of their personal business on the internet, have a chat with a colleague or have a good game of foosball.

Now this does present some management challenges in that not all departments are created equal. There are two types of departments at Argos, proactive and reactive. In some departments, the work is proactive. This means that employees of these departments need to create their own work. The sales department is an example of such a department. There is an unlimited amount of work to do in the sales department. You can always look for a new client or make another telephone call. The second type of department is a reactive department. The PM department is a good example of a reactive department. Our clients determine how much work this department has. If there is a lot of work coming from clients, then the PM department needs to work very hard and manage all the projects and stay late if necessary. If there is less work coming in then the PMs have more free time.

As a result, we have a situation where we control more in some departments and less in others. What makes it challenging from a management point of view is that an employee from a proactive department might look at someone in a reactive department and say, why do they get such long breaks, how come every time I go to their room they are doing non-work related stuff on their computer, why do they go for long lunches, etc. Well, the answer is quite simple. These same people will have to stay on the job until it gets done; they can’t just go home and finish the job tomorrow. Still, even in these proactive departments, we do the best we can to allow as much freedom as possible for employees to create their own work. We believe this is fundamental to motivation. At the end of the day, it all comes down to trust. Take the leap of faith!

When all is said and done what we really care about at Argos is performance, regardless of whether an employee is proactive or reactive. As a result, this trust is really offered only to employees who can perform in such an environment (some people are just dying to be controlled, measured and tested). Employees we can’t trust won’t survive. Employees who take advantage of the opportunities our system offers flourish. At Argos, we call this the Unspoken Deal and, at the end of the day, I think it makes us a stronger company and a more appealing place to work.