Challenges Of Managing Employees

Challenges of Managing Employees
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Challenges of Managing Employees
Introduction
The existence of committed and skilled employees in an organization, in today’s cutthroat economy, needs more consideration than in the earlier period, due to the increasingly intricate nature of work. Greater innovative advancements and intellectual accomplishment are essential and management must keep abreast of employees’ motivation, technological advancements, and social features of managing employees to stay ahead of their competitors. By efficiently developing the skilled individuals, companies may attain thriving results and develop a very prolific workforce (Cummings & Worley, 2014). The most significant task of managers is to motivate its taskforce to work more effectively towards attaining the company’s objectives and goals. Private and public sectors usually have different motives and goals and are managed by rather different principles, with distinctive factions managing their actions and processes. Compared to the public sector, private sector have more autonomy to function, public organizations are managed by traditions, laws, structural bureaucratic checks and balances, and rules that restrict creative ways of managing employees.
One of the key attributes of the public sector is the huge number of official procedures that happen to be critical to guarantee that it works. Additionally, not only do these procedures exhibit more levels of formalization, they also entail more red tape.

Hale, Borys & Adams (2015) define red tape as the processes, rules, and regulations that are enforced and involve compliance burden for the company but lack effectiveness. Because authority is usually subdivided into three main branches: judicial, executive, and legislative, public organizations have a high degree of red tape. So as to avoid the abuse of power and ensure transparency, the level of formalization in the public segment is higher compared to the private section. Several studies have laid emphasis on the differences between how employees are managed in the private and public sectors. Generally, public sector workforce places a high significance on doing tasks that are beneficial to the society while in the private sector, employees place a high importance on the economic recognition and rewards they get (Gerhart & Fang, 2014). The goal of this research is to evaluate five major tests of governing employees’ in the public sector as well as create strategies for how public sector supervisors can prevail over these issues.
Challenges of Managing Employees in the Public Sector
Overview
The business world is rapidly advancing. In the private sector as in the public, inevitable demographic specifics are challenging how organizations are planning to meet their talent needs in the future. Innovative government directions, created from administrative changes and economic disturbance, need the public sector to take up new responsibilities and roles even as employment and talent predicament emerges. Innovation in technology continues to influence the private workplace sector as well as the public. New ways to deal with the distinctive aspirations and needs of the individual is steadily attaining recognition in various workplaces. These tendencies are even now offering public sector with a wide choice of vital employment disputes, which will only strengthen with time. The public sector is faced with several challenges in relation to employees’ governing that are impacted by culture, history, and administration of governing performances within this sector. Moreover, the different degrees of employees from administration to unionized staffs, to non-unionized staffs, can make employee management practice further challenging. In the face of notable transformation, the public sector has to come up with innovative ways of governing its employees to develop efficiency, good work performance and enhance employee engagement.
Objectives and Goals are not always comprehensible
Several employees in the public sector are aware of the company’s objectives and plans. In sectors such as healthcare, there is a universal perceptive of an overarching directive; employees have a definitive go-ahead of enhancing wellbeing and health. However many of the staff do not get clear and enough communication from their supervisors regarding what actions and strategies are needed for them to add to these goals. This communication gap between employees and the business leads to a misalignment between the goals of an individual and the strategies of the company. This leads to employees having no clarity on the main priorities and they eventually end up struggling on deciding which projects they should focus on more. This normally results in workers spending a lot of energy and time on tasks that do not add to the purposes of the business and the employees also start feeling overwhelmed without a comprehensible sense of direction. Regrettably, to drive aligned performance, communication alone is not enough. Managers need to guide employees to comprehend how their actions have a direct influence on the organizational strategies. Leaders should make the strategies and goals clear and realistic. The supervisors ought to recognize and utilize all chances to correspond the objectives of the company. This will help guarantee the strategy remains the topmost priority for their employees.
Moreover, by tying all projects back to the organizational strategy will assist staffs to make apparent links and have a clear understanding how their dealings contribute to the growth of the company. Public sector managers should also influence their supervision teams to help cascade and recap customized communications in a way that reverberates with their diverse group of employees. Managers should also try and see things from their employees’ perspective and make certain that the strategies being put in place are relatable to their staffs’ responsibilities and roles. This can be attained by having flowing objectives from the administration and work with the employees to connect the organizational objectives with career planning. When there is a good link between an individual’s and company’s goals it will create a conducive working environment to collaborate and work in uniform and eventually attain better employee commitment.
Delayed Feedback Processes.
Performance assessment cycles differ in government agencies, departments and also collective conformities. Despite their differences, there is an inclination amongst public sector managers to forego coaching and feedback opportunities for official performance assessment procedures. In public sector, even though the reviews tend to vary across all sections, workers are inclined to meet with their managers once or twice a year to get reviewed. This approach used by most public departments is very challenging as most supervisors end up struggling to incorporate both informal and formal feedback leading to the possibility of bottling up reviews rather than uniformly dispensing it all through the year. Employees end up getting criticism that has little to no significance to their present performance circumstances which may lead to a general reduction in the workforce accountability. Furthermore, the formal feedback process is often cumbersome and time-consuming which often lessens the managements’ proclivity to provide regular and well-timed feedback and review to the employees leading to performance problems because criticism is not given when it is needed the most. The best way to handle this challenge is by creating coaching moments for their employees. This will assist workers to become more committed, increase and cultivate their skills. Public managers should stop paying attention to the regulation of the performance reviews and shift towards frequent, real-time productive innovative and coaching opportunities that will enable them to enhance employee engagement. Additionally, with the shift in the culture of the work environment, managers ought to take into account the needs and expectations of the multi-generational taskforce that progressively require a flexible performance management structure with well-timed access to coaching and review.
Fear of the Cooperative Union
Public sector supervisors are faced with the issue of supervision in an extremely unionized setting. Cooperative unions are put in place to safeguard workers and managers; though they can be hard to comprehend, and the probability for union complaints can often limit and shape how managers govern and offer performance feedback to the employees especially when performance changes are needed. This lack of understanding and fear of how to go about managing unionized employees can cause the management to avoid sharing productive reviews and feedback or critic employees. Allowing such limitations to govern how managers’ deal with employees can affect the productivity of the organization and its capability to meet their objectives and goals, and can frequently lead to supervisors not achieving the preferred performance level of their workforce. Instead of managers fearing unionization they should use it. Unions are a reality in most if not all factions of public organizations. And even though they seem intimidating, there are a lot of opportunities to make certain performance it managed successfully for all staffs, particularly those that are unionized. The cooperative union should not be used as a way to circumvent giving constructive review and feedback to poor performing employees. Taking the time to comprehend and learn how unions work will help the management employees and make sure they come up with ways to enhance performance in the organization.
Limited Incentives
Incentives are regularly offered by companies to motivate preferred behaviors and top performance. Nonetheless, the correlation between performance management and incentives, in the public sector, is not obvious because it is policy based and highly unionized. From a reward and recognition point of view, there are no chances to make a distinction between individuals who are just meeting their expectations and the ones who are going the extra mile to do their job well. Rewards are basically based on permanent status, while raises are conventionally associated with a staff’s capability to efficiently meet consistent selection decisive factor, rather than on their personal fit and performance for the post. The lack of connection between these actions in the public sector can lead to a weakening of the influenced employee’s commitment. Public sector companies are also hierarchical in nature; hence this can lead to the staffs viewing progressive career advancements as unachievable. Individuals who seek to enhance their career often prefer to change departments rather than hope for a promotion and these challenges the management in terms of not being able to adequately reward and recognize top achieving employees, as well as motivate all employees to perform well. In the public sector, methods to rewards and promotions can be quite difficult to implement, however, leading practices recommend that performance appraisal is not just about tangible rewards. Reward and recognizing of employees vary from one individual to another and the management is tasked with identifying what or which approach will be best suited for each and every employee. When the intrinsic and extrinsic motivation is clear, it becomes easier to inspire and engage the staffs in other ways. Some of the reward and recognition opportunities include but are not limited to; special programs, flextime, career planning forums, indirect benefits, and public recognition.
Cultural Change
Organizational culture can be defined as the way people do things in a given setting. It is a perception and experience of individuals who have worked together for a long time and have come up with a way they interact, behave, and are accustomed to working with each other. There are for key organizational cultures that can be witnessed in most companies. One is the power culture whereby influence and power is from an individual in a fundamental spot, the role culture is more of an administration where the individual’s role is more significant than the position and authority, the task culture is the tasks being handled and the person culture lays emphasis on what someone is doing in a given situation (Alvesson &Sveningsson, 2015). The issue of supervising a change in culture in the public sector is highly dependent on how robust their current culture is and the magnitude of the planned change. The issue is in ensuring that the change is accepted all over. These challenges are not devoid of techniques in which the management can use to minimize them. For example, the supervisors could use the recruitment procedure to employ individuals who will be a good fit for the proposed culture. Secondly, they could offer personalized training and boot camps to help employees accept the new culture by illustrating the importance of change in the organization.
Conclusion
There is an invariable challenge to the management in the public sector as to if they are truly fulfilling their organizational obligations, suck up to the politicians, follow the board’s directives, or the public. With constant interference, the managers are not able to effectively govern their employees as most decisions and policies are already in place and change is rarely accepted. The problems summarized above can bring about major limitations for the public sector management when working towards accomplishing company’s objectives. Nonetheless, tackling these issues using successful performance management approaches and strategies such as having meaningful incentives, using cooperative unions instead of fearing them, creating coaching environment, cultural enhancement and having clear and realistic communication in the organization can assist workers to recognize and streamline their attention and priorities on constructive tasks will not only tackle some of the issues that lead to them being overwhelmed but can also bring about great employee engagement and infuse a sense of use and commitment of the employees. By taking the needed precautions in ensuring the organization’s objectives are included into the staffs’ performance plans, management can attain a high engagement of taskforce and help employees comprehend how their performance influences the performance of the business and is able to bring about individual advancement within the workplace. Given the proper tools and be outfitted with important practices, management in the public sector has the capability to increase employee productivity and engagement, meet the hassle of developing workers and place of work and attain the intended result and goals now and in future.
References
Alvesson, M., & Sveningsson, S. (2015). Changing organizational culture: Cultural change work in progress. Routledge.Cummings, T. G., & Worley, C. G. (2014). Organization development and change. Cengage Learning.
Gerhart, B., & Fang, M. (2014). Pay for (individual) performance: Issues, claims, evidence and the role of sorting effects. Human Resource Management Review, 24(1), 41-52.
Hale, A., Borys, D., & Adams, M. (2015). Safety regulation: the lessons of workplace safety rule management for managing the regulatory burden. Safety science, 71, 112-122.