Managing Grunt Work Assigned to Team Members

Getting the best performance out of employees who distribute mail or operate the copier machine in a company often means managing grunt work. While there is very little glory and recognition to be got from doing “grunt work” someone has to do these jobs in order to keep a team and the entire organization working smoothly. To help you manage employees who are assigned grunt work routinely you need to know what is involved in the tasks and follow some of the tips that we have learnt and outlined below.

Learn What Is Involved In Grunt Work

Very few employees start at the top of the organization where grunt work is minimal and more emphasis is placed on managing teams and delegating tasks. Therefore most are familiar with grunt work as they start at the intern level and have to get coffee for the team or ensure that everyone has copies of an important document. As they progress to the manager level they aware of what is involved in grunt work, how many people are required to do it and how long tasks take to be completed.  With this complete understanding of grunt work managers will be able to delegate tasks more efficiently and provide guidance to fresh employees so that they perform well.

Assign Grunt and Growth Related Work

Even if an employee has just been hired as an intern and is dealing with certain tasks that are classified as “grunt work” they should be given a chance to do others that will improve their skills in the long term. Tasks that are oriented towards building the employee’s skills, when assigned along with grunt work helps them maintain their enthusiasm for the job and keep them motivated to finish all that they have on their plate for the day.

Every Job Has a Degree of Grunt Work

While grunt work gradually goes down as people progress higher in the corporate chain of command, many jobs include unglamorous bits that result in you having to fill our multiple forms or spend hours doing data entry. Employees in your team therefore need to understand that Special Forces teams and detectives in the police force have an amount of grunt work assigned to them which they just cannot avoid and have to complete to ensure that tasks and arrests are documented accurately. In many companies CEOs take up grunt work that would otherwise be assigned to lower level employees and create code or fix bugs in software, as they have not grown out of the habit of doing these types of tasks.

Reduce Complaints around Grunt Work

Currently many companies that have been set up by entrepreneurs and have become successful are managed in much the same manner, as when they were started. These companies often see CEOs arriving early in the morning and doing a bit of the grunt work including starting up the coffee machine. Setting an example for team members by doing your share of grunt work therefore is becoming commonplace. Managers when doing grunt work show employees in their team that they do not have a sense of entitlement and set an example for others for follow.

Motivating your team to do the grunt work in your company is not brain surgery and is something that can be accomplished with ease provided you set an example for others to follow.