How Effective Employee Management Can Drive Organisational SuccessBy Mr Rajendra Sappa

Employee management plays a crucial role in driving organisational success in several ways, as it is an essential component for maintaining a healthy and effective workforce. Although related but yet different from the broader concept of HRM, employee management chiefly focuses on the operational and immediate day-to-day activities related to individual employees, including their performance, development, and well-being.

While HRM (Human Resource Management) takes a strategic and organisational-wide perspective, encompassing broader responsibilities such as strategic planning, policy development, and workforce planning, employee management primarily focuses on managing people as individuals, fostering teamwork, and addressing their needs and concerns to enhance their day-to-day experiences within the organisation.

Put simply, employee management is a set of employee-focused activities, processes, and tactics primarily driven by managers and supervisors supported by technology and systems (such as HRIS, payroll systems, and other employee management software and applications). Such activities typically include recruitment, onboarding, training, performance management, and addressing individual employee needs and concerns. The primary objective is to oversee and optimise employees’ performance, well-being, and development.

This article explores the significance of employee management and how it positively impacts an organisation, contributing to the overall organisational effectiveness and success.

The relationship between employee management and business goals is an important one. Business goals are the desired outcomes that an organisation sets out and aspires to achieve. Employees are crucial to any business as they help accomplish the set business goals. Given this context, how an organisation manages its employees (in terms of how it develops them, informs and communicates with them, and addresses their grievances) can have a considerable bearing on the business goals, directly impacting organisational success.

After all, how an organisation manages its employees determines how engaged the employees are in delivering the desired outcomes. In fact, how an organisation manages its employees can even affect its external corporate reputation, influencing how prospective customers think about the entity.

Here are four benefits of employee management, underscoring why managing employees effectively should be at the top tier of an organisation’s priorities.

1. Enhances employee engagement

Employee management and employee engagement are closely intertwined concepts that significantly impact each other. One of the foundational elements of effective employee management is clear communication and regular interaction. Clearly communicating roles, responsibilities, and expectations and sharing objective feedback is fundamental to employee management.

When communications are clear, employees understand the organisation’s mission, vision, and goals. This not only makes employees aligned better with the business goals but also makes them more engaged. Regular interaction provides opportunities to reinforce this alignment, helping employees see the direct connection between their work and the company’s overall objectives.

2. Increases productivity and lowers labour costs

How employees are managed affects business outcomes. Effective employee management that leads to employee engagement can pay off in productivity. Ineffective employee management that leads to low engagement levels, employee turnover, and inefficient processes can cost an organisation adversely, affecting the bottom line. Better employee management practices help identify issues at earlier stages, improving employee performance and productivity. This, in turn, leads to reduced turnover, ultimately lowering overall labour costs.

3. Ensures employee-manager processes are seamless and agile

When an organisation leverages HR technology as part of its employee management strategy, such HR tools and solutions can efficiently streamline and automate crucial interactions or key touchpoints between employees and managers. It is worth noting that, unlike the broader HRM, where the responsibility is shared between the HR staff and organisational leaders, employee management is primarily the responsibility of immediate managers or team leaders who directly interact with employees.

Today’s HR tools and solutions can help enhance employee-manager relationships by simplifying their interactions from onboarding to goal setting through regular check-ins, performance reviews, professional development, recognition and feedback, grievance resolution, workload and task assignment, collaboration, career conversations, transitions, and exit interviews.

4. Provides better insights into the workforce

Effective employee management empowers an organisation to easily analyse organisational-wide data about workforce and operations, providing comprehensive and actionable insights into employee performance, development, retention, turnover, and more. These insights are actionable and can accurately indicate when to re-calibrate processes and activities to correct mission misalignments.

Conclusion

Managing employees effectively is an art unto itself, as each employee is unique in personality, motivations and needs. It is a challenging and evolving task. Organisations can implement effective employee management practices through effective leadership at the managerial level, supported by adequate technology. As frontline managers and supervisors are directly responsible for managing their teams’ day-to-day activities, they play a crucial role in setting expectations, providing feedback, conducting performance evaluations, and addressing employee concerns.

By taking a proactive approach to employee management, organisations can better spot inefficient processes or mission misalignments that may be “slowing things down,” hindering organisational success.