Managing staff in your home can be an incredibly rewarding, though sometimes challenging situation. As with any job, there are a million things that can go right, and sometimes even more than can go wrong. What can you do to help your struggling household employee while preserving the working relationship? Here are some tips to help you get started.
Start From The Beginning
One of the first things to think about when you’re noticing that your employee isn’t performing well is: have they been set up for success? Have you taken the time to effectively train them, sharing your household manual, and detailed expectations for their role? Try to think of your home as a business that you’re running and imagine how you’d want to be trained if you were coming into this ‘business’ without any prior knowledge of what makes it tick. If you haven’t made a habit of clearly going over the expectations you have for each role upon hire, we recommend doing that right away.
Weekly Check-In’s with the Struggling Household Employee
Your home has so many moving parts that things change regularly and sometimes without notice. Establish your expectations and maintain them by meeting weekly with each staff member. In this quick meeting, you want to ask how the employee is feeling in their role, and find out if they have all of the tools and resources they currently need to do their job well.
Discuss any changes to the schedule or any additional expectations or needs that you have for the upcoming week. Make sure that your employee feels comfortable enough to open up to you about issues that may arise like questions they have about their pay or struggles with the kids, and be open to working together to find resolutions. The most important result of this weekly meeting is that you and your employees will establish a direct and open line of communication in a comfortable space where you can talk about things that need to be worked on and things that they’re doing really well.
Ste Goals + Follow Up
Motivating your staff is an essential part of improving their performance. During your weekly check-in consider setting some goals for the year, focus on areas of their performance that you hope to see improvement, and write it all down. Use these goals as a way to offer encouragement and kudos to your staff for a job well done. For instance, if you realize you have a struggling household employee and you notice them making an effort to change, then be sure to acknowledge that.
The key is to be consistent with communicating what you need from your staff. You must also provide them with all they need to do it well. Motivating them with areas of growth opportunity is also important.
SOURCE: Adventure Nannies
