HR Pulse - Summer 2008 - (Page 38)

Don’t Set Up Your Managers to Fail By Michael Henry Cohen their time on technical/clinical responsibilities, administrative/bureaucratic paperwork, projects and reports, meetings away from the work unit, and putting out fires/reacting to crises. As a result, employees complain that their manager is not accessible, supportive, or sensitive to their psycho-social needs. They frequently ask themselves, “Where is our manager when a helping hand is needed, a serious problem requires her immediate attention, a co-worker conﬂict must be resolved, a customer’s conduct is out of control, a dysfunctional employee is raising havoc on group morale? Does our manager really know what’s going on? Does she care? Why is he not doing anything about it? He spends all of his time behind closed doors in his ofﬁce or is busy attending meetings.” Customer and employee satisfaction suffer and performance quality decreases when managers are busy on tasks that keep them disengaged from their own staff. Because of competing priorities, managers can’t ﬁnd the quality time to: • Practice MBWA (Management By Wandering Around), making customer and employee rounds • Monitor and evaluate outcomes on a ﬁrst-hand basis • Address customer complaints in a direct and immediate manner • Provide a sincere and appropriate compliment immediately following an event that is worthy of praise • Coach and counsel, train and develop staff. (Place a resource in employees’ hands just before they can apply the information, observe them in action, and provide immediate performance feedback.) • Confront an employee for his dysfunctional conduct in a timely, speciﬁc, and behaviorally concise manner • Role up one’s sleeves when a helping hand is needed. Many hospitals have recognized this problem, and their response has been to “empower” em- 38 HR Pulse Summer 2008 D oes your hospital neglect or undermine its middle managers and first-line supervisors? Years of downsizing and restructuring have resulted in fewer managers with a greater span of control and more employees to supervise. As if this is not challenging enough, many managers find it difficult to focus on performance management and customer and employee relations issues, because they spend an inordinate amount of Customer and employee satisfaction suffers and performance quality decreases when managers are busy on tasks that keep them disengaged from their own staff.

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of HR Pulse - Summer 2008

HR Pulse - Summer 2008 Contents Pulse Points Executive Director's Letter President's Message HR Leader Profile: Carol Bank, SPHR Special Report: Building a Thriving Workforce Creating A Best Place to Work Employee Morale Don't Set Up Your Managers to Fail From Tedious Task to Strategic Process Employer-Assisted Housing Changing the Paradigm of Nurse Recruitment Workforce Recognition: Simple Gestures Go a Long way Advertisers' Index

HR Pulse - Summer 2008

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