Getting to Know Your Employees

Do you want better employees?  To have better employees, you need to know your employees better.  By doing this, you will know what incentives to offer, what their weaknesses and their strengths and what you can do to make them work better for you.

From the time you hire a new employee, you should be getting to know them.  I don’t mean that you have to be friends with them.  Actually, being friends with your employee can be bad, but you do need to know them.

Find out what they like and don’t like, what do they like about their jobs, how about the company they work for, what do they like to do in the spare time…these are the things you want to find out about them.

If you have a large staff, you can do this by having donuts and coffee one morning a week and picking one or two subject to discuss that don’t have anything to do with work.  Make it a game.  Put some questions on different strips of paper and put them in a bowl.  Have employees pull one piece of paper out and ask the question out loud and have them pick a person to answer the question or have them answer the question, themselves.  Make sure your questions aren’t too personal.

If you have a small staff, you can hand out a questionnaire for them to fill out.  The questions you ask can be something as simple as:

If money weren’t an option, what type of job would you like to do?

When you aren’t at work, what do you like to do?

What is your favorite food?

These types of questions will help you know what kinds of incentives they might like.

So get to know your employees.  It will be good for them, you and your company.