I am a manager at a small grocery store. There is a culture of (encouraged) positivity and transparency here, and I do my best to keep those general sentiments up—I try to give my employees as much agency as they want to have, and align my expectations of them to what actually has to be done around the store. It’s just groceries. We stock them, keep the store clean and safe, and comport ourselves with kindness and respect while we are in the store. In general, I lay out my expectations for my employees at the start of the shift, so I can make changes if someone needs/requests an accommodation. However, recently I have been struggling to come up with a more respectful way of asking employees to perform a task mid-shift. My peers often use the expression, “Would you like to do (blank?)” but I feel that this way of asking is lacking, because we’re not really asking the employee if they want to do the task; rather we’re telling them to do it in a roundabout way. Ideally, I want to make requests of my workers, not demands. I’ll usually frame them as, “These are the store’s needs right now—x and y—which would you like to do?” and this seems fine, but when I need a specific task done, something like, “May you please do (blank)” doesn’t always resonate well with everybody.
I’m just looking for insight into what ways people like being asked to do something. There are no right or wrong answers in my mind—I’m open to (and appreciative for) anything.