Every manager knows that they need to be on top of things at any time, making sure that their team members deliver high-quality work, respecting set timeframes and deadlines. They also need to pay attention to potential roadblocks that can appear on their way to success and find effective ways to tackle them. This is a tall order and many business leaders rely on micromanaging, attempting to have everything under control.

However, hovering over employees’ heads, watching their every move is an outdated practice that employees despise for all the right reasons. When you try to micromanage your teams, you give the impression that you don’t trust them, thinking that they may not be competent enough to deliver wanted results.

The business world is changing rapidly, and the leader of the future is expected to manage employees with authority and empathy while fostering mutual trust and respect.

Here are several different approaches you can use instead of micromanagement to make your team highly productive, motivated, and satisfied with their outcomes.

Offer Your Employees Flexibility and Autonomy

The first step towards empowering your team to tackle the tasks of their own accord is providing them with clear guidelines and instructions. They need to know what their responsibilities and expectations are from day one so that they can complete their tasks successfully.

By setting clear goals and prioritizing, you’ll encourage your team to collaborate and tackle potential problems together without needing your input. What’s more important, you’ll build a relationship based on trust, making your employees feel more confident and comfortable with making work-related decisions.

Once you start implementing this leadership style, it won’t take long to notice how effective your team has become in delivering wanted outcomes without your interference.

Foster Culture Based on Mutual Trust and Respect

This step is closely related to the previous one. Namely, if you want to let your employees come up with plausible solutions and fresh ideas, you need to have trust in them. By letting them work together, learning from their mistakes and experience, they will develop professionally and personally, acquiring new skills and learning how to make decisions independently.

Building trust between you and your employees is a long-term process and it requires a lot of patience and confidence on both sides. This said you may have doubts and fears that some of your employees may abuse your trust and fail to achieve set goals.

This fear may drive you to start micromanaging your team again. But you don’t need to worry. A sudden lack of transparency and productivity decrease may be clear indicators that some of your employees are cutting corners, and that you need to take action.

Always Be Ready to Jump in and Help

Giving your team the freedom to do their work at their pace, making work-related decisions and choices doesn’t mean that you can sit back and relax. You still need to mentor your employees and monitor their performance.

With that in mind, you can rely on an automatic work time clock app to provide you with accurate information about time spent on each of the ongoing tasks and projects.

In this way, you’ll be able to spot potential bottlenecks that may slow down your employees in completing their tasks and meeting set deadlines. Use this real-time tracking data to act on the spot and tackle issues that may endanger your project success and run down the team’s productivity.

However, to maintain the atmosphere of trust between you and your employees, make sure to use this advanced digital solution transparently, allowing your employees access to their dashboards. Only in this way will you make the most of time and productivity tracking software.