BLUF: We are hiring another supervisor and I will need to give up some of my direct reports to this new supervisor. Any suggestions on how to choose?
Greetings, I'm one of two administrative supervisors for an ambulance service. Currently each of us have 56 direct reporting employees and we have finally convinced our boss to add another supervisor to our team. Once hired, we will have to transfer a few of our employees to the new individual. Naturally I have high performers and some low performers when you have as many as I do. I don't want to give up all of my high performers and I don't want to give the new person all my low employees. (Ok, maybe I do but I don't think it is fair to do so, lol)
So, I was looking to see if there are any suggestions out there from those how might have done something similar in the past. I don't want any of my directs to feel like I didn't value our relationship enough because I got rid of them, but yet, still need to off load some.
Thank you for any advice you can offer.
Ryan
Expense a dartboard
In all seriousness, I'd pick randomly. Make the fact that you chose randomly well-known. Hell, if you think people will react really strongly, you could gather everyone around and pick names out of a hat (I don't recommend this, because it shouldn't be *that* important). Any method where you hand-pick people without an objective rationale that others can apply and get the same answers will result in someone getting their feelings hurt.
Alternately, if you can get together with your peer and work out some way of "specialising" your staff, you could each take a certain subtype of employees. For example, if you're running the ambulance crews, you might decide to split up the staff between ALS, BLS, and CCP/Pedi (if you had about equal numbers of each). The benefit of this is that each supervisor can then focus on the particular needs of that particular subset of the staff, which can result in much more effective outcomes. However, it does risk an imbalance if you don't have an even split of people, and you need to be confident that the balance will continue into the future.
group decision
So... the three supervisors are a team in of themselves. Therefore, when the new hire comes onboard, all three should sit down together and discuss how you are going to do this. You want to spread out the good and the bad.
If people don't think it is fair. Tough. Your response is, we selected various staff to evenly spread out the workload. Work is not a democracy.
D.