How To Prepare Your Employees For Your Absence

If you are thinking of running your business without you, your employees would play a critical role in your success. Hence the need to prepare them to handle the business effectively in your absence.

But, how do you prepare them for your absence?

In this article, we share a few tips on how best to prepare your employees for your absence:

1. Hire The Right People

You can never go wrong with hiring the right people for your small business. 

I wrote more about it here. 

Essentially, your employees are critical to the success of your business – no matter what superhero abilities you may have. 

You need skilled, reliable and culturally fit employees to execute your plans and strategies to grow your business. 

You cannot successfully build your business to run in your absence without hiring the right people.

2. Create A Healthy Workplace & Culture

Can you imagine buying your dream car and not maintaining it properly?

That is the same thing with hiring the best people and not providing the right environment and culture to help them succeed. 

No matter how good they are – if your business environment is unhealthy, it would stifle how much impact they can bring to your business. 

And before long, they would look for other career opportunities.

If you want to make sure your business thrives even in your absence, you must create a healthy environment and culture.

One that encourages them to be self-directed, and understands that it is okay to fail and be able to foster new ideas.

3. Define Employee’s Roles & Expectations

If you are going to be absent from your business, you will benefit from making sure that your employees understand their roles and responsibilities within the company. 

I am not talking about roles you tell them orally. It has to be written in simple English, so there is no room for confusion.

Additionally, your employees need to know what results are expected for each of the roles or tasks they perform. 

By clearly defining their roles and expectations and communicating the same with them, you are making it easier for them to perform the right tasks, and be on the same page about expectations.

Employees sometimes find it difficult to understand their role in your business. 

Make it easier for them by clarifying their roles and your expectations for them. 

This way, everyone can focus on optimising performance.

4. Provide The Right Training & Tools

Another way to prepare your employees for your absence is to empower them with the right skills and tools to run the business effectively on your behalf.

Training and retraining your employees to keep them up to date on the latest industry skill sets will greatly impact your business, whether you are there or not. 

Such training empowers your employees to bring fresh ideas and innovation to your business, which is important for growth.

Apart from training your employees, providing access to the right tools needed to do their work successfully is important.

Make sure your employees have access to the operating manual (checklists, standard operating procedures, etc.) and other tools necessary for their job duties, especially if you are going to be absent from your business.

You must develop your employees into leaders who would continue to advance the business goals despite your absence. 

To do this, you must intentionally encourage them to be entrepreneurial, provide leadership training, and create environments that foster the development of leaders.

What do you think might hinder your employees from being properly prepared for your absence?

Photo by Christina Morillo

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