Introduction
The manager’s work involves close collaboration with employees. Establishing a healthy and productive work environment in the company is crucial. For this, the manager must use specific tools and approaches to communicate with workers, colleagues, and leaders constantly.
Primarily, supervision is crucial for tracking and evaluating employees’ performance and determining whether it aligns with the company’s goals and strategic plans. This essay will discuss two points concerning the manager’s supervision process. One will be aimed at the most challenging attribute of supervision, which requires much knowledge and skills. The second, in the author’s opinion, is the easiest part and can be provided intuitively. Regardless of the manager’s professionalism, they must adapt their skills and knowledge to external circumstances to create efficient work for employees.
Most Challenging Attribute of Supervision
The management assumes the application of various approaches to effectively and consistently manage employees’ work. It is crucial to assess workers’ abilities and their alignment with the company’s goals, and to create a healthy, productive working environment. Therefore, the managers play a significant role in the organization’s well-being.
However, specific external happenings can significantly influence their ability to supervise. The remote, virtual performance was chosen as the most challenging attribute of supervision for managers. Notably, it is a real issue for humanity, as evidenced by the COVID-19 pandemic, during which all companies should develop a new approach to remote work. Managers must learn how to collaborate with the company’s employees and maintain the efficiency of the working process.
For example, one of the most challenging aspects of virtual supervision is connecting across various work environments (Hoefling, 2003). According to Hoefling (2003), “managing a virtual team means managing multiple environments and workflow processes in ways that support the virtual team and its members” (p. 132). Consequently, the manager’s workload has doubled and requires new knowledge to maintain good performance during virtual supervision.
Specific Skills Needed for the Remote Supervision
One of the most important goals of a manager during virtual supervision is to use excellent communication skills to obtain the necessary information from employees. In addition, it is crucial to inform them about the company’s goals, plans, and strategic views, to make their remote work qualitative. However, one should highlight that to accomplish the abovementioned goals, the manager should have written communication skills to deliver the information appropriately (Hoefling, 2003). The manager’s tasks during remote supervision could include instructing, reassuring, delegating, coordinating, and fostering excellent communication among employees and across the company’s departments (Hoefling, 2003). All these issues highlight the difficulty of achieving this supervision attribute.
How to Make It Easier
To make virtual and remote supervision easier, it is crucial to emphasize the importance of establishing practical training within the company. It is essential to create them before a critical situation, such as a pandemic, when their application should be as fast as possible. Managers should acquire the vital skills and knowledge regarding the aforementioned factors to prepare for a force majeure situation (Horstman, 2016). In addition, particular skills, such as oral and written communication, will be important in their regular supervision.
The Easiest of the Supervisory Tasks
Managers’ work in supervision requires close communication with employees to establish a trustworthy, efficient collaboration. However, some situations assume variations in the distance. One can highlight that this issue could be one of the most manageable tasks for managers. This fact is due to experienced managers’ ability to intuitively assess the need for close or distant collaboration with employees.
According to Watson and Harris (1999), “listening to the managers in our study, we see that many of them are engaged in working this out for themselves” (p. 162). It means that after years of communication with workers, the manager can understand when to provide distance in collaboration with employees. Notably, the newcomer may experience specific difficulties with this issue (Watson & Harris, 1999). For example, it could be problematic for them to identify situations in which communication should be close and those in which distance should be maintained. In these terms, supervision will be efficient and helpful in creating a safe and effective work environment.
Conclusion
In conclusion, it is essential to emphasize that supervision is a complex and multifaceted process in a manager’s work. It requires a profound knowledge of the company’s functioning, while many external and internal factors have challenged it. Skills such as business communication, managing specific software, and establishing effective relationships among various company structures and departments are crucial. However, particular issues, such as considering distance when communicating with employees, can be developed and refined into an intuitive approach.
The effectiveness of the manager’s work will be evaluated based on the alignment of the accomplished goals with the company’s overall strategic plan. Remote supervision, virtual technologies, and communication software are crucial for managers’ work. Supervision is generally necessary to sustain qualitative and practical work in the organization.
References
Hoefling, T. (2003). Working virtually: Managing people for successful virtual teams and organizations. ProQuest.
Horstman, M. (2016). The effective manager. ProQuest Ebook Central.
Watson, T. J., & Harris, P. (1999). The emergent manager. ProQuest Ebook Central.