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Best Practices

Discover some general tips on the four components of supervising students.

Motivate

Your ability to motivate employees is one of the key competencies that predicts your effectiveness as a supervisor. It's widely accepted that engaged employees feel more motivated to go the extra mile.

Discover some tips on how to motivate your employees

  • Provide opportunities for learning new skills
  • Set and track attainable goals or targets
  • Allow for student input and decision-making
  • Build trust and respect
  • Honour your commitments
  • Model desired behaviours and work ethic
  • Communicate openly and honestly (verbal and non-verbal)
  • Provide performance feedback

Recognize

Employee recognition is the acknowledgement of a job well done. But, why is recognition so important?

Well, recognition:

  • Increases self-esteem and job satisfaction
  • Leads to increased productivity
  • Fewer employees quit

It's all connected: Appreciated employees tend to be engaged employees.

By providing opportunities to grow, you signal that the good work a student employee is doing does not go unnoticed.

Examples of how you can recognize your student employees include:
  • Interesting and new tasks
  • Involvement with special projects
  • "Promotion" to new duties (e.g. assisting in training new co-workers)
  • A simple thank you note: "Great work on project X!"

Manage Expectations

Here are some key themes to focus on when you are managing the expectations of your new hire:

  • Desired Results - Identify what is to be done and when
  • Communication - Acknowledge success
  • Guidelines - Explain the relevant policies and practices
  • Resources - Identify the support available to help accomplish the results (e.g., staff, budget, technical tools, etc.)
  • Accountability - Set up performance standards (e.g., if someone is continuously late, explain why this is a problem)
  • Consequences - Specify what will happen as a result of non-performance (e.g., may not be able to assign more interesting projects)
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Note: If the employee belongs to a union, consequences must be according to the terms laid out in their collective agreement.

Provide Feedback

Supervisors who use a coaching approach view feedback as a development opportunity and regularly seize opportunities to help their employees improve. Providing feedback is essential because it helps employees answer two concerns:

  • How do you expect me to contribute?
  • How am I doing?
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Tip: It is especially important to provide feedback early on, when the employee is within their probationary period, so they can course correct, as necessary.


Effective Feedback

Good feedback needs 4 core components:

  • Timely (e.g. acknowledge success immediately)
  • Specific (e.g. coach them on improvements by giving them attainable goals/tools to get there)
  • Actionable
  • Supportive

Feedback Ratio

When it comes to feedback, experts say that in general, you need to give 5 pieces of positive feedback for each 1 piece of negative feedback.


Delivering Feedback

When delivering feedback, it's a best practice to ask your employees about feedback style preferences:

  • How often would they like to get feedback on progress, issues, concerns, success?
  • How would they like to collect this feedback?
  • Do they have any learning goals? Identify relevant learning opportunities.
  • Ask for feedback on your feedback and ask if:
    • You are giving enough?
    • Is the feedback clear? Are you giving enough details?

Feedback DO's

  • Make time for regularly scheduled check-ins (e.g. bi-weekly, or as needed)
  • Focus on specific behaviours
  • Describe rather than judge
  • Observations rather than inferences
  • If improvement is needed, agree on a plan

Underperforming Employees

Read our guide on talking to an employee who is under performing

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