Team Management

From Entrepedia: The Entrepreneurship Wiki

Your team is an incredibly important aspect of your venture; even if you have not yet reached a point where you require a team of staff, it is a good idea to become familiar with points of team management. No matter how small your venture, you will have a team of people responsible for making it work, and even though they may not be paid employees, understanding how to work with that team will help make achieving success that much easier.

Sometimes determining who is going to be involved in your team, how large it will be, and subsequently how to approach team management properly can be closely connected to the structure of your business, so when you are just starting out putting a decent amount of consideration into your business's structure is an important part of developing a strong, well-managed team in the future.

If you are looking to start recruiting and hiring employees, then you are likely facing a fairly expensive and time consuming process; however, if it is done right it can offer your venture significant benefits. That said, even if you have managed to hire the perfect staff team, it is up to your team management to ensure that everything works smoothly, both on a daily basis and when facing more specific, one-off situations.

There are some online services offering employee management for a cost, such as Employee Management Ltd in the UK, however with the right information, a small business or startup shouldn't need to pay money to manage a team that they can more than likely manage themselves.

1 Employment Practice and the Law
2 Communication
3 Team Management Systems
4 Disciplining and Dismissing Employees
- 4.1 Further Information
5 References

Employment Practice and the Law

The best place to go to understand the employment laws in the country where you are setting up your venture is to the government website that outlines labour policies officially. For example, in the UK, Direct.gov offers UK citizens an official central resource for public service information, including information on employment terms and conditions. Entrepreneurs in the U.S. or looking to expand to the U.S. would be advised to look at the U.S. Department of Labor website for information on employment law, while those in Canada can turn to the Human Resources and Skills Development Canada website.

Of course, there are other websites that can help you understand Human Resource Management on a more international scale, such as HRM Guide International.

If you know of a website or of contact information by which entrepreneurs can access employment laws in countries that have not been already mentioned, please add them. It is better to have an understanding of the employment laws and policies to which you must conform than to find yourself at the wrong end of a wrongful dismissal claim.

Communication

If your team consists of a network of people who each require access to the internet and e-mail, etc, then you may want to look into an applications and messaging server program such as Microsoft Exchange or IBM Lotus Domino, which can offer you an internal e-mail service as well as other applications which can make managing communication within your team easier. There is also a freeware option available in the Unison Server, which may be the more appealing option for small businesses and startups that have teams that are still quite small. The Unison website also gives a more comprehensive outline of the benefits that the server offers and how it can help your venture.

Team Management Systems

You may find it useful to turn to IT solutions and software to help you manage your staff or team. For example, you may want to use payroll software to reduce your administrative costs and speed up the payroll calculation process. If you are interested in finding out more about payroll software, BusinessLink offers a great deal of information on the benefits and drawbacks, including a guide to choosing the right software provider here. In addition, the HM Revenues and Customs website offers a PDF list of Payroll Standard accredited software products/services and suppliers. You may wish to consider options offered by providers such as Payroo, Iris, Accentra, and 12Pay.

There are also time tracking software services which can help you estimate your project time, such as Magsoft, which offers its Timeless Time & Expense software to help users customise their time tracking to their particular venture. In addition, there are a number of Free Open Source Software (FOSS) options available to organise your small business or startup team, such as EGroupware, which offers, among other features, WebMail, an address book and calendar, ProjectManager, and TimeSheet, a time-tracker application. Another great available option is MindQuarry, which combines Team Management applications with task management, wiki knowledge management, and file-sharing.

Disciplining and Dismissing Employees

Disciplining your employees is a potentially controversial aspect of team management; it is, again, important to be aware of your legal responsibilities in disciplining employees, but more than that, you should be familiar with etiquette and what is appropriate when it comes to dealing with employee behaviour. Your main goal in disciplining your employee's conduct is not to punish them, but rather to improve their conduct or behaviour - you want your employees to come away from the experience with a recognition of what they have done wrong and a sense of how to adjust their conduct, not with a sense of injustice and a grudge towards you.

Identifying when to discipline your employees is, in some cases, quite obvious, while in others the line of action to take can be vague. Out-Law.com suggests that "it is... essential to distinguish between capability issues which should be dealt with under a capability process and true disciplinary matters. Only allegations of misconduct should be dealt with by a disciplinary process." ^[1] However, it is also important that you address any issue of misconduct within a timely fashion. If you wait for too long, points out Robert Bacall of Conflict 911, you run the risk of "send[ing] a message that undesirable behavior will be accepted or even not noticed." ^[2]

However, sometimes a problem with an employee reaches a point where progressive discipline has not had any effect and the misconduct has continued; sometimes the misconduct is of a nature that disciplinary action designed to improve the employee's conduct is not appropriate, such as theft. In such issues, you will have to consider dismissing the employee, and if this is the case it too must be done with sensitivity to both the law and to what is appropriate within the workplace.

UK Employment law offers employers five reasons for fair dismissal of an employee: conduct, capability, redundancy, retirement, or a statutory requirement which the employee does not or no longer meets and which prevents them from continuing as an employee. However, keep in mind that these are only potentially valid reasons; you will be expected to show that you as the employer acted reasonably in dismissing the employee. You will also be expected to have familiarised yourself with appropriate statutory procedure for dismissal, and to have followed it directly. The same two expectations will apply to dismissals in any business in any country, not just in the UK.

Further Information

For more information regarding the discipline and/or dismissal of employees, you can turn to one of the websites provided above to learn about employment law in your country, or read one of the following helpful sites. If you know of other websites offering advice, please add them here.