6 Easy Steps to Turn Your Average Employees into Star Associates, Part Five

By Corey Nielsen on Tue, 2006-09-26 07:38.

Part Six: Core Values [read]

Policies and Procedures

Although it may seem a bit labor intensive, we can't stress enough the importance of really going through (at the very least) the major points of your employee manual. I don't know how many times I've been asked to design and develop a costly seminar for a company that includes things like dress code, showing up to work on time, and other basic company policies. These are the basics that every leader should address with his or her team.

While it may not be a national bestseller, the employee manual was created to take all of the guesswork out of what is expected of employees.

Most employee manuals cover the dress code, sexual harassment issues, pay scales, privacy guidelines, and other rules and regulations within the workplace, as well as a variety of other useful tenets to help ensure that everyone understands the actual “laws” of the company.

Here again is an opportunity to avoid all the issues that come up when this kind of information is never conveyed. Most supervisors simply hand the employee manual to the new hire and assume he or she will read it cover to cover. Ask yourself, have you ever done that? Probably not! But if you take even 15-20 minutes to review the key points (those things that seem to continue to cause difficulty among current employees that never got the "employee manual talk"), then you may just give yourself a fighting chance to not have to spend the next six weeks steering the behavior of this new employee away from things that could have been avoided from the beginning.

Remember, at the end of the hour-long meeting, this new employee will be asked to sign a document stating that he or she understands all six key points of this employee development program--and the company’s policies and procedures are one of those six points.

This is a great opportunity to ensure that employees understand and take seriously everything in the handbook.

In the final installment of this series, we will provide teams with the set of core values on which your company was founded, in order to help guide behavior.

Click on the following link to continue reading:

Part Six: Core Values

For tips to effectively train your people and streamline your organization, and for other solutions to your staffing challenges, visit www.traininginabox.com. Sign up for your free newsletter at www.quicktrainingsolutions.com to make your HR training and development life easier. Corey Nielsen designs and delivers innovative and effective training solutions for businesses through NTG, his business development and training company.

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