How to Start New Hires on the Right Track

Assessing employees starts on Day One. Your hiring process shouldn't be complete until you have a fully-oriented employee with their own development plan -- a clear plan of action that will engage and hold your new hire accountable.

Because the sooner you set expectations for your employees, the more likely you are to have a productive team that supports and grows your business. And that isn't the only benefit. There are three primary reasons to create individual development plans for managing performance. A development plan will:

1. Set expectations for performance. It gives employees clear expectations for their results. Statements in writing mean there is a greater likelihood of meeting or exceeding expectations. Having clear goals makes them more achievable.

2. Create a coaching document and put a process in place with a road map for advancement and a schedule to review progress, which holds managers accountable for providing feedback.

3. Create a benchmark that shows growth and improvement or the lack of progress against goals. This benchmark will assist you in developing your team members at all levels. Creating a record of improvement will make it easier to adjust the job fit for the employees and to make decisions in a more timely way about where you want to invest in developing employees.

Development plans show what employees can do to grow and develop, to advance, to become more valued, and to be more satisfied in their work. They also point out what kind of support and assistance they will need to get where they are going faster.

Components of the Plan
One mistake many managers make, often because they use poorly designed development plan templates, is to take on too many challenges at once. Keep the plan as simple as possible. Identify a combined total of two or three measurable objectives within the following three job-related categories:

• Focus on the employee's career growth. Examples include attending classes, seminars or workshops, or participating in on-the-job training or self-study programs (e.g., books, DVDs or web-based training).
  
• Help the employee improve personal aspects of his or her performance, behavior or conduct. Examples of task-oriented performance goals are improving computer proficiency, time management or presentation skills. Or the employee can focus on correcting behavioral problems that negatively impact group morale, job performance or job satisfaction. Examples of such goals are developing conflict resolution or stress reduction techniques and building collaborative coworker relationships. As with professional development goals, effective performance objectives are well defined, are measurable, and are clearly linked to specific job-related outcomes.
  
• Provide specific assignments to participate in or manage ongoing or future projects. When setting project-oriented goals, outline the scope of the role the employee is to play, list resources and completion time frame, and define the desired result.

Components of an Effective Objective
Objectives must be ones the employee has agreed to accomplish within a specified time. The goals should be specific and challenging but attainable. Identify everything that both the employee and manager need to provide to accomplish the goals as an objective. Each objective should have four parts:

1. State the desired achievement for task mastery or improved behavior.
2. Define the applicability of each goal to the function.
3. Specify the method of learning.
4. State the time frame for achievement.

When to Assess
Many companies tie development to performance appraisal. While it's true you need to set expectations before you can identify areas for growth, employee development is an ongoing process. Reviews should be scheduled as often as needed according to the support, advancement, and abilities of each employee.

Each job and organization will evaluate and measure its employees using a variety of tools. Some of the most common include:

• Biannual or annual performance standards/reviews/appraisals: These usually include quantitative and qualitative sections where both the employee and manager have opportunities to make remarks. They state expectations and goals. The employee's performance is measured against these goals at the end of the time period. Traditionally, these appraisals are directly tied to annual bonuses or pay increases.
  
• Budget and quota measurements: These include measuring a person's performance against budget expectations and quotas. Employees are evaluated based on how well they perform, and rewards are directly tied to performance.

Regardless of how you choose to evaluate employees, using a development plan customized for each individual will make the performance evaluation process easier and fairer and offer ongoing opportunities to provide coaching and feedback throughout the year, not just at performance review time. It also reduces the risk of surprise in the results for the employees.

The manager and employee will work on the development plan together, but the more involved the employee is in determining the areas to work on, the more committed that individual will be to accomplishing the goals. The objective is to create an environment that encourages continuous feedback from managers, which will help employees advance more quickly, achieve more, and avoid unnecessary problems and setbacks.

How to Hire Positive Employees for Your Business

No entrepreneur is an island. You were created to work with others in a positive environment.

Your business success depends on you attracting customers and employees with whom you work well together. Such cooperation challenges the familiar notions of achieving success by becoming a self-made person and pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps. Despite its familiarity, such a notion is simply a myth. You’ve been the beneficiary of working with others since before you can remember.

Do you remember your mother and father getting up at two o’clock in the morning to feed you? Of course not. Even though it happened night after night for months, depriving your parents of much-needed sleep, these gracious acts of compassionate kindness your parents offered just because they loved you slip through your memory.

There are other gracious acts of cooperation others have done for you that similarly slip through. All of these cooperative acts combine to make you who you are today -- a unique human being capable of a positive workstyle.

Cooperating completely with others presupposes that you are incomplete alone, but complete with others. Sometimes, our ego gets in the way of understanding this concept. Part of the challenge for entrepreneurs is that we are really good at so many and varied tasks that we buy the lie that we can truly do it all. The truth is if we really want to make our dreams come true, we must redefine our egotistical reality of "I can do it all" to "There is something I missed."

One of the most essential ingredients of working positively and cooperatively with others is that how much you think you accurately perceive in life, there is something you miss -- or some subject that someone else knows more about than you do.

No matter which direction your business is going -- up or down -- you can use some help. The good news is you have it. The universe is designed to partner with you, to provide resources beyond your control for your business’s well-being, including relationships with others who can help you.

The key to leveraging these relationships is to become the kind of person that you want to attract into your business life. You should be someone you would want to do business with.

Consider these questions in shaping yourself to attract positive business partners and clients:

1. What are my core values, i.e., those character traits that I want to exhibit in my business relationships? What would my family members say are my core values?
   
2. What are my life priorities--those matters in life that I consider most important not just in word, but in work behavior as well? How do my calendar and bank statement reflect these priorities?
   
3. What is my unique contribution to make in the world through my business and how do I live into it daily?

Just as "birds of a feather flock together," you literally attract people with whom you share core values and life priorities. For example, if you conceive your business more positively, you will attract similar people with whom you can grow your business--and whom you can also help in their lives and businesses. Those who resonate on this frequency are drawn to you because of your common business life pitch.

Conversely, if your business life is more negatively grounded, you find people coming into your business--whether as customers/clients, employees/suppliers--who are more of a negative persuasion.

Do you ever find yourself complaining about your customers? They don’t pay their bills on time, or maybe they’re constantly trying to get something for nothing. Who attracted them to your business?

What about your employees? Ever hear yourself saying, "You just can’t find good help these days" or "Nobody wants to want work anymore"? Who hired these employees?

Now stop, and ask yourself: "How am I attracting these people? What is there about me that attracts them, that pitches them in my direction?"

One of the greatest challenges in creating a positive workstyle is understanding that like attracts like. These people onto whom you shift responsibility for your challenges are in your work life because you chose them. You attracted them by way of your business’s core values, your business priorities, and your business’s unique contribution.

Once you perceive your work life in a positive light, then, because you are created to cooperate completely, you begin to attract others to your team who share your positive direction. Those who choose to work positive will find their way to you.

The people around you--customers/clients, employees/employers, family/friends, and vendors/suppliers -- are there for you to lean on when the weight of doing business is too much for you to stand alone . . . and when isn’t it? These people are your team.

The article is taken from http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/222548