Give Your Employees the Gift of Flexibility

As a manager, you have a tremendous amount of influence over the lives of your employees. On your own, you have the ability to make your team members feel like valued, respected professionals. Or you can make your employees' lives a living hell.

One of the best tools at your disposal is flexibility in setting peoples' work schedules. Let people come in at a slightly different time so they can drop their kid at school or avoid a particularly nasty recurring traffic snarl. A little human compassion can go a long way to making a team member's work experience much less stressful.

I'm not talking about coddling your team. Especially in IT, you will be asking your team members to work odd and inconvenient hours. During deployments or major troubleshooting exercises, you will be asking them to cancel personal plans and stay for long hours to get the work done. That is the nature of IT. People who don't like that need to be looking into a different career path.

What I'm talking about is treating people like respected professionals. Set clear expectations and hold your team members accountable. That is what it means to treat people like professionals. But treat them like respected professionals by giving them the flexibility to accomplish the organization's work in a time and manner that will work for everyone involved.

If you can do that, you will reduce their stress and increase their focus. The organization's work will be done more efficiently and reliably. And isn't that in everyone's best interest?