How to make employees meet deadlines

If you are a manager and in charge of finishing a project before a certain deadline, the most important aspect is to ensure that your employees and other members in the project meet their deadlines as well. If individual team-members are not able to meet deadlines then it is impossible that the project can be finished, even if the responsible manager did nothing wrong.

A manager in charge of a certain project or initiative has the duty to ensure that employees meet their deadlines. The following practices can help you to ensure that the project stays on track and your employees meet their individual deadlines:

1. Realistic Planning

If your planning is not realistic and your schedule is too optimistic, there is no chance that the deadlines can be met. Therefore the first step is to make sure that project plans and deadlines are realistic - not just from the managers perspective but also from the perspective of the individual employees.

In plans are unrealistic from an employees’ perspective, they  will not be committed to even try to meet the deadline. It’s necessary to remember that even though a manager might think that a goal is realistic, an employees might think differently. The best rule is to be completely honest about expectations with  employees and to ensure that everybody agrees on the plans.

2. Set deadlines together with employees

It is highly recommended to include employees in all planning activities. This is necessary to ensure that they are committed to the goals. One fatal mistake would be for the manager to define the goals for the employee and only inform them about the facts afterwards.

Instead it is recommended that the manager lets employees suggest realistic deadlines first and only then tries to align them with the overall requirements of the project. This way an open discussion is possible and employees are engaged right from the beginning.

3. Demanding too much vs. demanding too little

One mistake that happens very often when setting deadlines is that deadlines are too ambitious or soft. If goals are too ambitious, employees might fear that they won’t make the deadline already from the beginning and procrastinate already from day one due to a fear of failure. If goals are not ambitious at all, employees might think that there is no pressure and take their time to get started, especially since there will always be more important things for them to do.

A manager needs to find the sweet spot between highly ambitious goals and and soft goals and keep a close eye on employees to see if they are procrastinating because the deadline is perceived as too difficult or too easy to achieve.

4. Constant monitoring

After manager and employees have agreed on certain deadlines it is the manager’s job to keep monitoring the progress. Of course the employee has to deliver his part as well and provide updates whenever requested. This sounds easy in theory but could bring some obstacles.

If employees feel that they can’t be completely honest about their progress with their managers then they might report a status that is different from reality. A simple delay due to some urgent work in another project might not get reported because the manager should not be upset and the employee is confident that he will catch up.

Therefore an honest and constant monitoring will allow to uncover delays early on and allow to find solutions to prevent any further delays.

5. Constant feedback

Nothing is more frustrating for an employee then providing status updates and then receiving no feedback or appreciation from his manager. It is certainly the job of an employee to do these status updates and when everything is on track it is easy to forget that the employee is actually doing a good job.

A manager should always provide feedback to the employee, at least acknowledging that the status report has been received and offering support to help the employee achieve the outcome.

This will keep employees motivated and sends an important message: That somebody actually cares that the deadline is met.

With these habits you should be able to drastically improve the chances that your employees meet their deadlines in the future and keep them motivated to put in the extra effort to catch up in case they ever fall behind.

Are there any tactics or habits that you already use to make your employees meet deadlines? Share them with a comment!

Bernhard S