Are You An Adult Day Care Manager?

Written by guest blogger Peter Gjersoe

This is for you if you are a founder, and feel that the title of “Manager of an ‘Adult day care center’” best describes your function.

You thought you had employed adults who would leave you alone and get on with their tasks unless they have a problem.

And you know, you just know that if only you had the time, you could do everything so much better and faster yourself.

However, you keep telling yourself that the ‘ability to delegate’ is number 2 of the good characteristic list for entrepreneurs on Gallup’s ‘Top 10 list’; so you swallow hard, and get on with it.

Following are eight tactics covering employees that will help you keep your sanity:

(1) Never outsource recruitment.

• Your best customer can easily come in contact with, and be influenced by, your least motivated employee.
• You must know what and who is in the pool with you.

(2) Understand and appreciate that employment is emotionally equal to the feelings associated with first dates, and you seldom learn the full truth initially.

• Your main function is to protect yourself from the pain and anguish should the relationship subsequently go sour.

(3) Hopefully, you have built your business on well-documented systems explaining ‘How-to-do’ things, as well as performance criteria that are easy to understand and measurable.

• If not, get going. You should start by being a mystery shopper in your own company. Regularly review every ‘touch-point’ where a client or prospect can come into contact with your business. Is the response the quality you expect? ‘If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it’.
• You would be astounded at how many businesses don’t even answer the phone number on their website.

(4) Before any employment, identify the task requiring to be done and make sure explanations and expectations are well documented and meet your standard.  Then build your recruitment process around the personality best suited for that specific task using one of the many personality profiling tools available. It is highly recommended to pick one personality profiling tool and use the same tool for all positions. The DiSK personal assessment tool is a very popular option.

• Employ based on ‘Uniquely suited for the task’, never on ‘all the benefits this person brings to the business’.

(5) Always employ based on right attitude over claimed ability.

• You can never teach, fake or encourage right attitude. However, most tasks can be learned using tools on the internet supported by internal teamwork. Lastly, you are more likely to build loyalty and stick-ability by employing low and then train and promote from within.

(6) Each employee must have one major task they are responsible for and know that you will judge their performance on how they execute that task.

• Please, regularly Inspect what you E

(7) You may consider employing key performance (KPI) based contractors instead of traditional employees.

Everybody understands we no longer live in a “cradle to grave” employment environment. However, ‘understanding’ and ‘accepting’ are seldom synonymous.

• A more appropriate expectation should be an analogy out of Hollywood: A group of individual specialists come together for 6 to 12 months to work on one major task. When the task is completed everybody goes their separate ways, and may work together in the future if the circumstances are right.

(8) Involve others in your social media efforts.

• Irrespective what industry sector you are in your business has two overwhelming objectives in a world where the internet makes it very difficult to hide anything:
• Be a constant publisher of quality content.
• Be the Customer Service provider in your industry clients rave about.
• Social media should be the foundation of your business. Social media is the best way you have ever had of speaking 1:1 with clients and prospects, for very little money.

Three guidelines:

1. Know your clients and where they ‘live’ on social media and connect with them there
2. Authenticity and honesty beat any professional setup every time
3. People will be blogging anyway. When you build a business you are proud of delivering outstanding customer service people will want to talk about it. Help them get the message out.

When I’m not writing articles, I help business owners; ‘Create better solutions for less in less time’. If there is anything I can help you with, please contact me at petergjersoe@me.com