Blog

February 10, 2010

The Key to Productivity Success Is Managing Employee Tasks

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When it comes to managing employee tasks there are a number of ways of going about it. You will need to make decisions in regards to assigning tasks, ensuring implementation, and evaluation of the work done. The way you approach managing employee tasks will very much depend on the type of business you run, and the make-up of your staff. In the rest of this article we will examine some of the possible options that you could consider.

The first thing to think about when managing employee tasks is how you are going to assign them. You might decide to allocate to the staff member that you feel will be best at doing the job, or you could assign a collection of tasks to different teams of employees. There are advantages and disadvantages with each approach. If you assign tasks to individual people then you are more likely to get the best person doing the job, but the problem will be that you will be completely reliant on that one person getting the task done; if they are absent or too busy then the task won’t be completed. The other option when managing employee tasks is to assign them to a team; the benefit of this approach is that there is more likelihood of the job being done because more people are responsible for it. The main drawback with assigning tasks to teams is that it can mean that the best person for the task might not be doing it.

When managing employee tasks it will be important to ensure that the work is actually being done. If you are using a team approach then you can assign one member of the team to be responsible for ensuring every task is completed. If it is individuals then you need to check up on them regularly to see that the work is being completed as assigned.

The final part of managing employee tasks involves evaluating any work that has been done to ensure that it has been completed. With the team approach you can have the team leader report back to you, while with individual employees you will need them to report back to you individually. It is important that you regularly check on what tasks have been completed to ensure that the work is satisfactory.

The choice between teams and individual assignment will often depend on the complexity of the task, and the skill mix of your staff. There can be many benefits in regards to team building and once groups of workers become familiar with working as part of a team they can be really effective. All the members of the team know that they are responsible for the tasks that have been assigned so there is a large element of self-monitoring. If the tasks are very complex though, you will likely be best to give certain individuals responsibility for them. When managing employee tasks you may find that experimenting with the different approaches will be the best way to go before deciding on just one. Of course, you don’t have to stick to just one method and it would be equally feasible to have a mixed approach where you use teams for some tasks and individuals for others.