Direct Supervision

There’s no set schedule for checking in with employees, because there are a lot of variables involved. Some supervisors manage a very small group; others have to keep track of big departments. Also, not everyone needs or wants the same amount of interaction.

“I think it depends a lot on the personalities involved,” O’Malley Rehfuss says. “I personally like to have a one-on-one meeting every other week with my team so I can touch base and go through any open projects they have. I can kind of see what’s going on with them. Then we also talk about whether there are things going on that are bothering them at work, or how they’re doing on their training.”

Supervisors should pass information from the top down, but they should also be a conduit in the other direction, Speckmann says. If they’ve cultivated an atmosphere of true openness and fairness, employees won’t be afraid to tell them the truth about what’s wrong in the workplace. When that happens and a solution is found, everyone in the workplace is happier.

An understanding of the differences in communication styles is extremely helpful for supervisors. In fact, some human resources departments go so far as to train managers in the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator—a personality assessment designed to help a person identify significant personality preferences—so they can fully understand their own personality type and how it might relate to the types of others. Once they understand, they can adapt accordingly.

“People have different personalities and different work ethics and different styles of work,” says Brent Reichow, business development manager at Rada Advertising, Inc., a Bloomington-based recruitment and retention communications company. “You really have to work together, between the employee and the supervisor, to understand what the manager’s expectations are of the employee and what the employee’s expectations are of the manager or supervisor.” Allowing people to work in the style in which they’re most comfortable will, Reichow says, “obviously affect retention.”

Consistency is important, but it doesn’t mean acting the same all the time, Farrar explains. “People need to be able to reasonably expect that if they do A, then B follows,” he says. “But sometimes you have to do C, and D will follow. You have to be able to flex between differ- ent styles of management depending on the occasion. What you might do in an emergency is different from what you’ll do when you are looking for innovation. What you might do with an employee who is very structured is very different than what you’d do with an employee who is very free-flowing.”