Workplace policies play an important role in setting expectations, managing employees, and ensuring adherence to company standards. However having too many policies can make things rigid and slow employees down while stifling their autonomy.
To solve this, you need to simplify workplace policies and cut the clutter. However at the same time it is essential you maintain control – and here are a few ways you can do both:
Try to avoid rigid communication guidelines that try to force your team to comply with them. Instead, be flexible and adapt the communication guidelines that you create to the needs and preferences of your team.
Keep it simple and define communication channels as well as expected response times. Aside from that, use software for employee monitoring such as Controlio to track how your employees use communication tools and design your policy around them.
Instead of focusing your policies on the processes by which things get done – shift to an outcome-based model instead to simplify them. Be clear what needs to be achieved as well as when it needs to be achieved by, but give your employees the autonomy to choose the approach that works best for them.
Employee monitoring tools like Controlio can be used to provide the oversight necessary without infringing on their autonomy. If necessary, you can even check up on employees’ via screenshots or screen recording features.
Excessive standardization is bound to down you in policies that attempt to dictate exactly what employees must do. Try to avoid that, and instead use standardization as a tool to provide consistency so that your employees stay aligned – but not so much that it locks them into a rigid structure.
As you may have already noticed, employee monitoring can help simplify workplace policies – and they can also help maintain control without chaining them to unnecessary policies. Software like Controlio can give you insights into employee behavior patterns and productivity trends so you can see how policies affect them.
The use of employee monitoring will help you reorganize outdated structures along with the policies attached to them. With Controlio you can easily use it to track attendance, work hours, workload distribution, app utilization, and a wide range of other metrics. On top of that its data can be accessed at any time or delivered at fixed intervals as reports – removing the need for constant check-ins or status updates.
To put it simply, your goal should be to remove unnecessary policies, while streamlining processes and simplifying the policies involved with them. If you can do that you’ll be able to give your employees greater autonomy and freedom while ensuring they don’t feel that they’re being forced to follow a rigid set of instructions.
Keep in mind that once you do simplify workplace policies – you need to be mindful of any new policies you add in the future so it doesn’t end up cluttered once again.