This blog first ran June 22, 2021, and has been updated with new information on July 20, 2022.

There are many ways that people measure how engaged the team members who work in their child care center are in their jobs and meeting the goals you set for them. 

You can observe and take notes. You can ask other employees.

But using a handful of simple questions to straightforwardly ask will garner the most complete, and likely accurate, information. Encourage your employees to be honest when answering a series of questions and assure that any constructive answers will be more than appreciated. 

Your employees will respect and appreciate this and, even if not right away, they likely will come to look forward to opportunities to answer your questions because they will see that it benefits them to be open and honest with their opinions, concerns, needs and praises.

Knowing What to Ask Your Employees

Here are a few examples of questions to ask to provide insight as to whether your employees feel they are valued and respected — their answers can show you areas that you might want to focus on for improvement:

• Is what is expected of you clear?
• Do you have what you need to do your work successfully?
• Do you have a daily opportunity to do what you do best here at work?
• Are you recognized for doing a good job on a regular basis?
• Do you feel like your manager, or someone else here at work, cares about you as a person?
• Do you feel encouraged in your development here?
• Do you feel like your opinions count?
• Are your co-workers committed to doing quality work?
• Do you have a best friend here?
• Do you feel you can learn and grow here?

Child care providers encounter challenging and stressful situations as part of their jobs.  Effective stress management helps us perform at our best so we can maximize developmental outcomes for kids and build a foundation of trust with parents.

Understanding the sources of stress for employees is key to managing that stress. Self care begins with knowing where stress comes from in their jobs so you can take steps to address it.

Building a support network is one way to mitigate stress employees may feel on the job. Other educators provide mutual support and empathy from someone else who knows what they going through.

To help your child care staff perform at their full potential, it’s important to provide regular feedback. A child care staff evaluation is a regular procedure used to measure the performance of your employees in each aspect of their job. Child care staff evaluations create an opportunity for providers to reflect on their strengths and weaknesses, identify opportunities for improvement and set goals to advance their personal and professional development. 

Check out this free recording of a Procare-sponsored webinar in which industry expert Kris Murray shares tips for hiring and retaining employees at your early childhood education center!

Questions Your Employees Want Answered

Likewise, your employees also have questions. Your employees want to know what is expected of them, how they are doing at their jobs and how they can be better at it.

Let’s take a look at some questions that almost every employee in a child care center, including yours, has:

• How decisions that you (as the director or owner) make impact their jobs and why you make those decisions
• Ways that their job can be made easier by something they can do or something you can do
• Opportunities that may be available to them and what steps they need to take to improve and excel at your center (or as a child care professional)
• All policies and benefits relative to them/their position and what pay increase schedules are
• What the future holds for the center and how secure their job is
• How the center measures up in the industry and against local competition
• What your goals are and how your philosophies affect the center

Make sure that your employees have the answers to all of these questions without having to ask them. 

How Procare Can Help!

Procare Solutions has many resources to help you with your staffing issues. Your staff members form the heart of your child care business, and you want to do everything you can to help make them the best educators they can be.

Procare is your competitive advantage when it comes to hiring and staffing your child care center. Procare’s parent engagement app allows teachers to keep parents informed in real time of what their kids are doing during the day, and gives them a way to send and receive messages from parents. Those updates are crucial to parent satisfaction, particularly to millennial parents who make up the majority of parents today. And happy parents translate to happy staff!

Procare’s all-in-one child care software has everything you need to alleviate the worries of managing your child care center.

Ready to start saving time and reducing child care stress with Procare?