By Greg Blenco
It can be easy for managers and employees to just go through day after day after day at work and only focus on what needs to be done right now before moving on to the next task.
A lot of managers and employees have more work to do than they have done in the past, so just getting everything done every day can be challenging. There may not be a lot of time to do anything else. However, I believe it is important to take the time to step back and think about ways things can be done better.
One way to look into doing things better is for managers to listen to employee suggestions. You can encourage employees to talk to you when they have ideas about how to improve the business. Employees have expertise in the jobs that they do, so it seems to make a lot of sense to ask them how they think things can be done better.
A lot of employees have ideas that they would like to share. But they aren’t sure if their manager really wants to hear what they have to say. However, if employees feel like you are genuinely interested in hearing their thoughts, then you will likely get suggestions from some of them.
The suggestions that employees give to managers could be good ones. Or they might not be. Another possibility is that after discussing an idea that has some problems the manager and the employee come up with an approach that will work.
However, even if the manager doesn’t feel that an idea should be implemented, listening to the suggestion ought to at least make the manager see things from a different perspective which can be beneficial. And hopefully the employee will at least appreciate being given an opportunity to share the idea even if it isn’t implemented.
When managers are thinking about ways things can be done better, they might get some good ideas by listening to employee suggestions.
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