Employee Expectations

Employee management is hard.
You should expect it to be. As business owners we want employees who will do exactly what we want, care as much as we do, do it exactly how we would do it, work for nothing, and never complain. (If you've figured out how to manage a crew to achieve these tasks, stop farming and write a book.)

Expectations & responsibility. We provide weekly online classes for our Maize Quest cornfield maze operators, and one of the most popular classes was on employee management and expectations. It was popular, I'm convinced, because employee management is a monumentally challenging part of what we, as business owners, do every day.

At Maize Quest, we developed a system of employee expectations, wrote that system down, and provided it to our operators to standardize the expectations of employees across all our corn maze locations.

The reason we had to do this was to force ourselves to write down what we really want from our employees. We found that the biggest problem in employee management today is uncommunicated expectations from owners and managers. It is the responsibility of the owner to write down what he/she expect from his/her employees, communicate those expectations clearly, and confirm, in writing, that the employees understand what is expected of them.

Meeting expectations. Could you meet an unwritten expectation? What if you had been repremanded for not meeting one? How would you act?

The hardest part about creating employee expectations is that you, the owner, have to define what you want; define the rules of employee engagement. You are responsible for setting the expectations and then managing by those expectations.

If an employee fails to meet an uncommunicated expectation it's YOUR FAULT, not his. Ouch. (No owner likes that part when I tell him/her.)

The power of the written word. After we wrote down what we really wanted from our employees, it became easier to get it. We could teach it, test for understanding, have employees (and parents) sign an agreement of understanding, and we could hold employees accountable to those expectations.

Craft your team. The flip-side of all this responsibility is opportunity. If you will invest your time in creating good, solid, acheivable expectations, you can create the team you want. You can monitor and adjust behaviors compared to a unified standard. You can reward, discipline, and even terminate based on employee performance against written guidelines, not just feelings or impressions.

You are in control. Create your own expectations. Hold you employees accountable to them. Hire well, monitor, review, adjust, terminate and prepare yourself for the most enjoyable management season you've ever had.

Take control of your team by writing down what you really want from the team members.

Have a great week. - Hugh