In my Insight series on employee counseling, I discussed how important it is for managers to be trained in employee counseling techniques.
Training managers in how to conduct employee counseling meetings is crucial to their management development. When there is no training and managers are not prepared, issues may arise for the organization.
For example, there may be situations where it’s “too little, too late,” where maybe there is training, but it’s not timely, and a manager has been in their new role for some time and has already been dealing with issues that they should’ve been trained on earlier.
There are a couple mistakes commonly made by employers regarding employee-counseling manager training:
- Not having a manager training program at all; and
- Assuming that all managers—including newly hired managers—have experience dealing with employee relations issues.
It’s very important not to assume that just because a manager is experienced means they know all the nuts and bolts of how to handle an employee-counseling situation.
In situations like this, it’s also helpful to offer ongoing training “refresher” courses for managers that have been with your organization for a period of time.
Steps Employers Can Take
Here are some things employers can do to ensure managers can effectively deal with employee relations:
- Make sure employees know company policies—First and foremost, employers need to ensure their employees know and understand the company’s policies regarding performance issues or policy violation issues.
Employers need to give a handbook to every single employee when they come onboard, and/or make it known where the employee handbook is located (such as on the company’s intranet site) so employees know what’s expected of them upfront.
When hiring temporary or contract employees, there should be expectations set for them to follow, as well.
- Find or create a “manager training” Web site—Some companies have an internal—or access to an external—management development Web site where managers can go to access ongoing training. This training should include a program developed to educate managers in a number of areas involving employee counseling.
For example, the training should include how to prepare for an employee counseling session, how to issue written or verbal counseling to an employee, how to document written counseling or document verbal counseling after it’s given, etc.
Training should also cover how to “fact-find” to attain necessary information prior to rendering a decision or corrective action in an employee counseling situation. Sometimes a manager may be in a situation where they need to do some “fact-finding” before deciding which approach should be taken.
It’s very important for managers to go into initial employee-counseling meetings with some facts and then they can listen to the employee’s side of the story.
In my next Insight, I’ll give some employee counseling manager training examples and more information about creating a training program tailored to your managers.
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