Today, we will be talking about our seventh work from home tip, and that is setting clear expectations between manager and employee. Remember that it’s a partnership. It’s a two-way street. Both the manager and the employee or the individual contributor need to agree on the same set of expectations going forward.
Now there are two types of expectations:
- Performance expectations, which are the results now outcomes that you expect to achieve within a specified period, whether it’s this month, quarter, or year. Performance expectations are set with your manager or your first level leader.
- Behavioral expectations, which are the values, behaviors, and attitudes required in the role. Now the behavior outcomes are generally set at the company level, and they are disseminated throughout the teams, reflected company-wide.
Five-Step Process for Setting Expectations:
Setting clear expectations is a five-step process.
- The first is to know where you need expectations set. Is it about performance in work or how you communicate with your employee or timing of projects delivered?
- Know the why. Why do you need to have these expectations set? The employee will go a long way if they understand the why of the expectations, not just the what. Make sure they are clear to you, and you can write them down. “I know it when I see it” is not a clear expectation. You want to have a clear expectation of what the work should look like when it should be delivered. You want to have that clarity before going in and talking to your employees.
- Meet and discuss. So once you have steps one and two done, you’ll want to meet and talk. So make sure both sides, employee and manager come prepared to discuss expectations. Generally, in my experience, this is about an hour-long meeting to understand what expectations need to be set on the work and the projects moving forward.
- Written expectations. After this meeting, you want to have clarification and understanding between both managers and employees so that everyone agrees. So you want to have a final set of written expectations for both employee and manager.
- Get agreement and commitment and both parties agreed to it going forward in the future. So you want to make sure that you have clear expectations going forward. If anything goes off the rails or something is not being done right, or if there are behavioral expectations that are not being applied, you can have another meeting with your employee.
That's why I wanted to talk about meeting with all of your contributors on a certain cadence during the week so that projects can stay aligned, and if there are any fires, they can be put out right away.
