It has been said that good management is the art of making problems so interesting and their solutions so constructive that everyone wants to get to work seamlessly. This quote holds true in the current ecosystem. Managers nowadays are much more humane than previous times. There are varied concurrent styles of management which are implied within organizations across the world and every manager acts differently under different situations. But still there are few situations wherein managers tend to go deep into their employees’ work and this one thing might backfire in the long run as identified by employees as “Micro - Management”.
What exactly is Micromanagement?
Micromanagement is a management style wherein a manager monitors an individual’s work very closely, tries to observe each and every minute detail, adds his own inputs to the final results and is not able to delegate the work properly amongst his team members.
Lets discuss in detail what is so bad about micromanagement and how it can ruin your business big time:
1. Lack of independence at workplace
Indulging too much in someone’s work basically curbs the employees’ freedom and he/she tends to feel a lack of independence at workplace. This impacts employee productivity in a negative way. There is a difference between employee tracking for better productivity and for criticism. If a manager pokes his nose at each and every work milestone, that creates a fully negative image of his in the minds of the employees. This news spreads from one employee to another and gradually the entire workplace may go against the micromanager
2. Killing the Creativity of team
Few of the departments like Marketing, Content and Development need the employee to be creative on various aspects. They need space and focus to think on newer ideas from time to time and a lot of experiments to be done before the final implementation. Now if a manager always asks for half baked updates or reasons for failure of an experiment then that disrupts the space and kills creativity of an otherwise productive employee. Just like meditation is always done at a quite and calm place and its good not to disturb the guy meditating in between, a creative person needs time until his full and final version gets ready. For instance, We360.ai is an employee monitoring software & employee monitoring app but it has to be used differently for different departments for best results. A data analyst and a software developers’ work cannot be judged on the same parameters.
3. Demotivation and stress
A team member which knows that his each step will be tracked and stumbled upon will always feel stressed about what’s going to happen next. Instead of focusing on his learning and work efficiency, he will just think upon showing better short term outputs to his manager to avoid unnecessary criticism. Gradually this would turn into workplace stress and impact the overall employee productivity and team’s productivity. Stress is never good on personal or professional fronts and will lead to a reduction in output or revenue for the company. It can cause health issues too for certain individuals.
4. Lack of cooperation and trust
A team must always cooperate and collaborate to deliver perfect results. Also, the manager who allots a work to an individual needs to have full trust on him/her else the desired outcome can never be achieved. Micromanagement always has a negative affect on such values. People stop cooperating at work and also stop trusting each other in such an environment. This is heavily hazardous to the organizational productivity levels. Good managers need to restore trust within the team members and this can be done only if such micromanagement instances are identified and corrected at the earliest
In general, it has been observed that the less experienced employees when promoted suddenly to higher positions tend to micromanage more than the seemingly experienced ones. So its essential for companies to give a proper thought before promoting someone to a managerial role. SaaS tools like we360.ai can play an important role here to understand who deserves what. This happens as they can provide detailed insights on employee productivity and factual workplace analytics that can help managers make better decisions.
It would be great to organize learning and development sessions for employees to understand the negatives of micromanagement well in advance to avoid any such situations in future. Every junior will be a senior sometime and he/she should be well trained on various management aspects beforehand.
We360.ai - The employee friendly monitoring tool always recommend clients to use the tool as a productivity enhancement tool and not as a micromanagement tool if they want to grow their revenue without the employees feeling as being micromanaged.
