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Motivate

Your ability to motivate employees is one of the key competencies that predicts your effectiveness as a supervisor. It's widely accepted that engaged employees feel more motivated to go the extra mile.

Here are some tips on how to motivate yours:

• Provide opportunities for learning new skills
• Set and track attainable goals or targets
• Allow for student input and decision-making
• Build trust and respect
• Honour your commitments
• Model desired behaviours and work ethic
• Communicate openly and honestly (verbal and non-verbal)
• Provide performance feedback

Recognize

Employee recognition is the acknowledgement of a job well done. But, why is recognition so important?

Well, recognition:

• Increases self-esteem and job satisfaction
• Leads to increased productivity
• Fewer employees quit

It's all connected: Appreciated employees tend to be engaged employees. By providing opportunities to grow, you signal that the good work a student employee is doing does not go unnoticed.

Examples of how you can recognize your student employees include:

• Interesting and new tasks
• Involvement with special projects
• "Promotion" to new duties (e.g. assisting in training new co-workers)
• A simple thank you note: "Great work on project X!"

Manage Expectations

Here are some key themes to focus on when you are managing the expectations of your new hire:

• Desired Results - Identify what is to be done and when
• Communication - Acknowledge success
• Guidelines - Explain the relevant policies and practices
• Resources - Identify the support available to help accomplish the results (e.g., staff, budget, technical tools, etc.)
• Accountability - Set up performance standards (e.g., if someone is continuously late, explain why this is a problem)
• Consequences - Specify what will happen as a result of non-performance (e.g., may not be able to assign more interesting projects)

NOTE: If the employee belongs to a union, consequences must be according to the terms laid out in their collective agreement.

Provide Feedback

Supervisors who use a coaching approach view feedback as a development opportunity and regularly seize opportunities to help their employees improve. Providing feedback is essential because it helps employees answer two concerns:

• How do you expect me to contribute?
• How am I doing?

Tip: It is especially important to provide feedback early on, when the employee is within their probationary period, so they can course correct, as necessary.

Effective Feedback

Good feedback needs 4 core components:

• Timely (e.g. acknowledge success immediately)
• Specific (e.g. coach them on improvements by giving them attainable goals/tools to get there)
• Actionable
• Supportive

Feedback Ratio

When it comes to feedback, experts say that in general, you need to give 5 pieces of positive feedback for each 1 piece of negative feedback.

Delivering Feedback

When delivering feedback, it's a best practice to ask your employees about feedback style preferences:

• How often would they like to get feedback on progress, issues, concerns, success?
• How would they like to collect this feedback?
• Do they have any learning goals? Identify relevant learning opportunities.
• Ask for feedback on your feedback and ask if:
  • You are giving enough?
  • Is the feedback clear? Are you giving enough details?

Feedback DO's

• Make time for regularly scheduled check-ins (e.g. bi-weekly, or as needed)
• Focus on specific behaviours
• Describe rather than judge
• Observations rather than inferences
• If improvement is needed, agree on a plan

Underperforming Employees

Click here to find our guide on talking to an employee who is under performing