Supervisors and Workplace Culture

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(light music) These lessons will focus on building your workplace culture. We'll talk about your role in empowering your team to embrace the company's culture and goals, appraising an employee's performance, and identifying organizational boundaries and how to overcome them. You can assist in developing goals for your employees by conducting a SWOT analysis. This looks at the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats that surround a person or company. It can be done for a single person, but using this analysis to examine your team can also give you a more well-rounded view of your organization. Doing the analysis may give you more insights into what kinds of goals would best benefit your company and how to reach them. By using some or all of the team members in the analysis, it can yield you more support in achieving goals. The more that the team is involved with creating the goals, the more buy-in they'll have toward fulfilling them. Knowing the strengths and weaknesses of your team can help you shape and motivate into an efficient and productive one. It's a best practice to use rewards and other positive reinforcement tactics to change or encourage excellent production or efficiency while sparingly using punishment or negative reinforcements to stop unwanted behaviors. For example, a team meeting its goal of having zero onsite injuries for six months can positively affect a SWOT analysis. So it's a good idea to remember to reinforce the positive efforts by rewarding the team as this can create a strong and beneficial teamwork mentality. A team member, when reinforced correctly, won't want to be the one who stops the team from being rewarded. This will give them extra motivation to move in a positive direction. Another way of empowering employees is through delegation. Delegating tasks can be viewed as a reward and be used to motivate employees. They're also a cost-effective way of creating efficiencies and spurring employees to view you positively. The team will see that you're demonstrating trust in them, that you value them and think they're capable of performing the needed tasks. Delegation also helps you identify which employees may be the most worthy of being promoted, by assigning people to perform suitable tasks and seeing if they excel. However, sometimes you might find yourself in the uncomfortable position of having to reprimand one of your employees. While positive reinforcement is generally encouraged, oftentimes the rest of the team will be grateful the supervisor took action toward the low-performing teammate. A team member who isn't performing is usually known to the rest of the group. So addressing the situation can be critical for the sake of maintaining morale among the rest of the team. Make sure to reprimand the employee in a private setting and to do so in a way that helps them learn to not repeat the same behavior. If the offense is serious and that the wellbeing of yourself or another team member is endangered in any way, consult your HR department.