The transition from my first managerial position to my second one included a significant increase in team members. I knew this would result in additional time dedicated to one-on-one supervision as well as a longer end of year evaluation period, but otherwise, I believed the principles, skills and techniques I had learned from my previous position would serve me well in my new one. Initially they did, but I had not anticipated two major changes that would occur as the number of my team members grew from two to ten. The first was the increased importance and intricacy of team dynamics and team building. The second was how difficult it was to get all ten members of my team together in the same room at the same time.
One of the reasons was purely logistical. Some of the team worked part time, and the full-time staff worked flexible hours. A few were parents, most worked second jobs, and all chose their own schedules. At the beginning of my tenure, I gladly offered this flexibility. Throughout my tenure, I grew to resent it. I still recognized its value, of course, but scheduling anything that required all 10 team members to be present produced the longest email chains this side of the Mississippi.
The second reason this was such a challenge was life- beautiful, messy, overscheduled life, sometimes predictable but more often not. Life would cause staff to miss work for any number of reasons. Many times, it was something scheduled ahead of time like a vacation or a doctor’s appointment. Other times, it was something unexpected like sickness or car trouble. Every once in a while, it was something altogether unavoidable like jury duty. In my first year alone, our team experienced the loss of a father, a best friend and two grandmothers. Tough year.
One time, a staff member was carjacked. At gunpoint and everything. Understandably, she was shaken and did not come to work that day. Subsequently she had to testify at the trial and missed many more days. All understandable. All a bit of a challenge when you are short staffed and trying to reschedule a team goalsetting session for the umpteenth time. But what is the alternative? Don’t let your staff get sick? Prohibit them from getting carjacked? Put a hold on death until the end of the fiscal quarter?
The members of your team are not just employees. They are people whose kids get sick and whose mufflers need replacing. It is why we provide time off. Whether our staff uses this time to go to the dentist or to go to Acapulco is entirely up to them. It is their time to use as they see fit and we have no right to suggest otherwise. Too often we send the message that taking time off is something to feel guilty about or ashamed of. We do this by praising Ed in accounting who hasn’t missed a day of work since the days of Bush, Sr. and we do it by encouraging our staff to use their vacation time but never actually using our own.
We are at our most hypocritical when we expect our employees to keep their personal lives away from the office as we continue to encroach on their personal lives with work. Whether it is a mandatory work-related event scheduled outside of working hours or an expectation that emails are answered on vacation, we continue to blur the lines between work and not work yet we admonish our staff when they do the same. As managers, we must do better. We must understand that our employees have lives to live and sometimes this means missing work. As it should be. An overworked and distracted employee is not at her best. Our team members must be allowed to live their lives. Their beautiful, messy, overscheduled lives. I had to learn to accept this and if you haven’t already, so do you.
2 Responses
This is so true. Employers often seem to ask more of their employees than the are prepared to offer in return. I have heard managers moan about lack of employee loyalty in less than a year after jobs were cut in a downsizing move. Employment is a give and take relationship and while many employers will argue that they give money and that’s all they need to give, companies that are more flexible with employees can expect to retain a happier staff, which in my book always seems to be a more productive staff!
Yes! Somewhere along the way we seem to forget that employees are people first and that they have values and responsibilities outside of the workplace. I once worked for a manager who wanted her employees to “eat, breathe and live” work. No thank you. I prefer employees who have a healthy, satisfying work life balance. Everybody wins!