Categories
Background Checks Human Resources Miscellany Personal Background Checks preemployment screening Uncategorized

Overlapping Assignments Can Anger Your Employees

We received this from Dianne Gubin’s TechExecPartners.com
SLIPPERY PROJECTS
True story. A client was assigned the task of identifying an 11-foot display for the front of a new retail store. The client called architects and designers. In the meantime, the client’s manager asked four other employees in the corporate office to identify a potential display piece.
Two days later, there was a team meeting. Each attendee discovered that the others had been asked to identify a display piece. Each could have been working on his or her own workflow. All were disappointed and confused that the manager was so impatient, that he did not trust one person to fulfill the requirement.
What happens when you are assigned a specific project, lead, or account, and your manager has assigned the same project to your colleague? Or work order changes aren’t implemented? Nobody gets anything done.
To avoid internal conflict and extra work:
  • Map out each employees role on the project plan
  • Set up matrixes and time schedules for accountability
  • Use Critical Path Map (CPM) or project management software tracking tools
  • Meet regularly to update key players

Work with the end result in mind.

Corra thinks this is good advice. There is enough politics in the office environment, enough petty jealousies, major jealousies and downright backstabbing that you don’t need to add more to the pile. Remember, some employees can get angry, and some can get violent. Fortunately they are very few.

More good advice is to be sure you run background checks on your job candidates. For one thing it will help you determine if some are less balanced psychologically than you would desire. Corra suggests the criminal report and the DMV Report. Driving records can tell you a lot more about behavior than just how someone jobs.

Check them out before you hire.

By Gordon Basichis

Gordon Basichis is the Co-Founder of Corra Group, specializing in pre-employment background checks and corporate research. He has been a marketing and media executive and has worked in the entertainment industry, the financial, health care and technology sectors. He is the author of the best selling Beautiful Bad Girl, The Vicki Morgan Story, a non-fiction novel that helped define exotic sexuality in the late twentieth century. He is the author of the Constant Travellers and has recently completed a new book, The Guys Who Spied for China, dealing with Chinese Espionage in the United States. He has been a journalist for several newspapers and is a screenwriter and producer.