It is a difficult situation to be in when you begin to think about how much oversight your employees need. If you provide too much oversight and control, you will gradually lose the innovative thoughts and ideas of your employees, however, if you do not provide enough oversight, things can go wrong very fast.
This is why the question of how much oversight and control do your employees need is so tricky. Yet it is not a crazy question to be asking yourself.
Your company is either something that you have built or contributed to building and, of course, you do not want to see it fail. You want to ensure that your employees are doing their best work while following your directions.
This is why certain companies must have more oversight of their employees. Companies that are in the skilled trade business know this the most, or at least, should know this.
New Employees are not Experts
When an employee is hired, often they are not yet experts in the position that they have been hired to fill. This means that they are bound to have blunders and mistakes that can be caught and corrected by a manager or director who is well-versed in the do’s and do not’s of the trade and the company.
In addition to that, the lack of experts in the skilled trade industry is often overlooked, which can cause internal damage to the companies that the employees work for. On many occasions, when something goes completely South, it is not because the employee is a new or outside hire.
It is often because there is a deficiency of expertise in the skilled trades due to the aging workforce in these industries. This results in your experienced workers moving towards retirement while not having enough time to hire and train younger employees before the experienced workers leave.
Oftentimes, training a younger employee can take upwards of 50% of your expert employee’s time while at the job site. While this time eventually does pay off, you’re often under strict timelines where you need your expert employees to keep making progress on the actual job. This leads to a difficult decision of when and how you can train new employees to replace your team as the older employees retire. But, to avoid disaster, you must make the commitment to training your new hires.
Not only does this keep your company afloat and without issue, but it allows the worker to gain knowledge that they might not have received without oversight. This is why it is so critical to assess which employees can provide oversight to others and which employees need to have someone keeping an eye on them.
