Establishing the right attitude
According to the Harvard Business Review, leaders who perform micro-management have reason to worry about the team in their absence. If your leadership system is based on standing behind everyone's back all the time to ensure things are going as they should, you have a problem. And not just when you are absent. You have a systemic problem.
Your long-term goal should therefore be to train employees so you can trust them and give them enough power to avoid them having to wait for you with their every decision. Your goal as a team leader should not be to follow employees' every step, but rather preparing their mindset and making them understand priorities and overall context so they can work on their own without having strictly to follow a fixed procedure. Then you need have no worries about any major errors or deviations during your absence because general rules and priorities have long-term validity and employees are thus able to work independently without the supervision of their superior.
Effective analysis
Another way to ensure your team is working as it should in your absence is to set up an effective reporting and analysis system that allows you easily to review your employees' work. By using well-set analytics tools and reporting, you do not need to worry about reduced efficiency in your employees' work because you can simply see how each person worked when you return.
In the long run, it is essential you implement the use of high-quality software and analytical systems that will allow you to analyse the effectiveness of the individual team members, who will become aware of this fact and then know that even in your absence you will be able to analyse their performance retrospectively.
Delegation of work
Finally, there is the most effective tool, namely delegation of work. Allocate tasks among individual workers and determine who is responsible for what. This is the only way to ensure individual team members will try 100% during various specific situations. Your instructions should cover a wide range of situations that may arise. After returning, go through the various cases and projects with individual employees, even if there were no complications.
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