Why Should Your Employees Like You?

Managing employees isn’t a popularity contest, but if your workers like and respect you as a person, your company’s bottom line is likely to show it.

Nancy Mann Jackson in a post in "Entrepreneur" writes about handling employees with kid gloves and getting along better with them.

"Taking careful steps to build trust, respect and goodwill among employees doesn’t just make it more fun to go to work, it can also boost your bottom line" She says.

She offers five strategies for maintaining employee relations in a recession and bridging the boss -- employee gap:

Keep your company afloat through the recession--and ensure that employees will stick around when times get better--with some of the following strategies:

1. Nix double standards. Don’t expect employees to follow your instructions if you don’t follow the same instructions yourself. “You can’t just sit back and not have the same standard for yourself as you have for your employees,” Weatherwax says.

2. Share the work. Nothing widens the gap between employer and employee like doling out the “dirty work,” such as asking employees to do something unethical or simply to work an unreasonable number of hours. To earn employees’ respect, business owners, “should never ask an employee to do something that they would not be willing to do themselves,” Darby says.

3. Make them laugh. Humor is proven to reduce stress and take the edge off of a tense conversation. “As the boss, you can set the tempo or the mood for the business day,” Weatherwax says. “If you can have fun with your employees and joke with them, they’ll have more fun and they’ll joke with the customers too.”

4. Enforce consequences. Whether it’s rewarding good work or holding employees accountable for mistakes, enforcing consistent consequences helps workers know what to expect. “Sometimes in tough times we overlook bad behavior and don’t recognize the good work being done by high performers,” Murphy says.

5. Share your thought process. Especially during tough times when employees are worried about keeping their jobs, you can earn goodwill by being open about the choices you make, whether it’s to cut costs or cut personnel. “The more transparent a leader becomes with his decision making process, the more likely employees are to trust those decisions,” Murphy says. “Share the data, explain where you got that data, and why you decided what you did. What scares employees is the unknown, and if you’re not transparent, they’ll expect the worst.”

Nancy Mann Jackson is a freelance writer who writes frequently about small business issues.