When you're a manager you need to try and reach that golden position of being firm but fair - while still being respected. How can you manage your colleagues without being overbearing or like Big Brother? How do you achieve the balance of watching them - but giving them room to breathe? Here are some tips on how little, or how often, you should be monitoring your employees.

Performance management

According to your management style and how laid back you are, you can choose to measure performance by output or not. Meaning, are you happy if a project gets done on time and on budget, and not know how the team got there, or do you want to check everyone pulled their weight? Most managers would go for the latter. If you only judge by results, then you can't see if one person is doing most of the work and the others are hiding behind them, just coasting along. This is why appraisals should be done in every organisation - though it's up to you how often and how detailed they are. You don't want to micro-manage your staff, but you want to see who is pulling their weight (or not). Although there may be company policy that overrides how often you'd like to appraise your staff, you can always offer feedback as frequently as you like.

Work vs. Working

In today's modern world, most of us sit at a computer for the working day. That doesn't mean that we are actually working - and that's largely thanks to the modern distractions that come on such computers. It's fairly obvious these days if someone is playing Solitaire instead of finishing a financial report, but what about the large grey area that has bugged employers for the last decade - the internet? Do you make it available to your staff or do you have it banned completely? Can you trust them to only Tweet, Poke or blog in their lunch breaks and not when they should be performing? It's a hard line to pin down between being strict and being lenient. Perhaps you let them have the internet for work research purposes, but do you block certain sites? Will it affect the job in hand? If you were a taxi firm, and looking up a map of Essex, it might get banned for having the word "sex" in thanks to any filtering system. If, every time you pass your employees' desk, they are on Facebook, what would you do? Think about how you are going to create an internet policy - and stick to it.

Phones and other expenses

Think about other ways where you can't really be lenient before it costs the company money. Do you allow your colleagues to make personal calls on their work phones, or do they have a work mobile that they are downloading expensive apps to? Are they running up mileage expenses claims when they only live 10 minutes walk away? These are other considerations on how stern you want to be with your staff and how closely you monitor how they are spending the company money. Of course, policies will be in place - it's not illegal to claim mileage, after all, but consider if your generosity is being flouted or taken for granted.

It's a fine line, but if you think about this beforehand, set a good example and let employees know what is and isn't acceptable so you can trust them more and monitor them less.