How to get your employees to do what you want them to

Does it drive you crazy when your employees can’t follow instructions?

You ask them to do one thing and they do something else – what you say (or think you’ve said) gets misinterpreted and often the job turns out no where near like you expected, or wanted.

Most business owners run up against this issue. It’s one of the most common frustrations we hear. You want your employees to do exactly what you want them to do, and to do it the way you want it done.

It sounds simple enough. So what goes wrong? And how are you going to get your employees to do what you want them to do – and get it right the first time?

Just sit back for a moment and consider this – sometimes it’s really hard to even get yourself to do anything (I’m thinking diets, new year’s resolutions etc.).

If you have that much trouble getting yourself to do anything, how are you going to get someone else to do it?

A simple method that could make a big difference:

Make your business systems dependent, not people dependent.
If you’ve got the right systems, and they’re implemented effectively, you will get the right results through your people. Almost every time.

The Manager of an island resort talked about this very problem. Many of his employees were native islanders … living and breathing “island time”. You can well imagine the difficulties involved in managing the results in such an environment.

He’d found telling his employees to do one thing, would lead to a vast array of different results, yet he’d given the same instruction to everyone. The environment in which they operated really condensed the whole effect so that without systems & procedures, chaos would take over in no time flat!

The Manager even had systems and procedures for the systems and procedures. It was the only way he found to keep the resort running smoothly and achieve the standard of results he needed.

How to sort your systems:

You’re probably wondering how you’re going to go about putting systems and procedures in place. Why not create a systems and procedures manual? This could take many forms – hard copy, online version, onscreen pdf etc, depending what suits your business type and what’s going to be easily accessible for your employees.

Sure, this will take some time – it’s not going to happen overnight. But if you consider the frustration to date, it’s probably well worthwhile. The time spent will be far outweighed in the long run by the time saved when your employees are doing it right the first time!

Not only that, with systems & procedures in place you can employ people with the right attitude and train them to run the systems. This tends to eliminate the “prima donnas” who often hold the business to ransom!

• Put the systems in place.
• Have a procedure to follow.
• If people follow the systems the work will get done in the way you want it done.

The systems run the business, the people run the systems.