How do I delegate work to my employees?

  • Amber Kuipers
  • Background
  • 23 July 2025
  • Edited 1 August 2025
  • 2 min
  • Managing and growing
  • Staff

You want to take the next step with your business and let go of day-to-day operations. Or maybe you have been working 6 or 7 days a week for the past few years and want more time for yourself. But how do you keep the quality of your product or service high? And how do you keep your staff from calling you with minor questions when you are on holiday or in an important meeting? Delegate work to your staff and make sure they can manage things themselves.

These 4 tips will help you delegate work to your staff with peace of mind.

1. Adjust the employment contract

You take care of paying your staff’s salaries yourself and that takes up too much of your time. So, you ask your HR employee to take over this task. This means that your HR employee gets access to your business bank account and takes on an important responsibility: paying out salaries on time. Assigning work tasks requires agreement from both employer and employee. So, discuss it first. Does your employee agree to an extension of their duties? Then change their employment contract and have your employee sign it. You will then not need a change clause.

Reinoud Pauwels of legal firm Ondernemingsjuristen.nl recommends recording the following:

  • Responsibilities and powers
  • Access to systems
  • Reporting and communication
  • Confidentiality

"The more specific, the better. That prevents discussion with your employee," Pauwels explains. "A change to the employment contract is extra important if it adds tasks for the employee that do not typically belong to that position." For example, if you ask your HR officer to also send out a weekly newsletter to the whole company.

Change secondary employment conditions?

Do you want to change the secondary terms of employment? You can do so with your employee's consent. You can also insist on a change if you have important interests and can agree on a change clause. Or you can make a reasonable proposal to which your employee agrees because they feel a sense of involvement with the business as your employee. In the latter 2 cases, the interests or the proposal serve as the basis for the change.

2. Employee handbook

You run a shop and start working on opening a second branch. So, you are no longer in the shop every day and you want to make sure its quality is maintained. The shop should be clean, customers should be served quickly and politely, and stocks should be replenished. These are all quality standards, which you can describe in your employee handbook. This handbook sets out everything your employees need to know about what to do when you are not around. Also, you want your employees to solve problems themselves. So, set out protocols in your employee handbook. An example of a protocol is a step-by-step plan of action in case of a broken machine or an angry customer.

3. Authorisation via the Business Register

Your used car sales company is growing. You employ more salespeople, and you no longer have time to register each licence plate in the customer's name yourself. So, you give one of your sellers the authorisation to do this themselves using KVK Form 13. The Business Register then states that your salesperson is authorised to transfer vehicle registrations. What is recorded in the Business Register is legally valid. That means that if the sale of a car leads to a court case, the judge will consider what is in the Business Register to be the truth.

An authorisation prevents abuse and fraud but also protects your company from mistakes. You can also grant a limited authorisation. This can be a limit on amounts but also a limit on tasks. For example, your employee can make purchases up to a maximum of €1,000. Or your employee may only sign for the purchase of office supplies. Does your employee exceed the amount or buy other items? Then the purchases may be cancelled.

4. Insurance

You have a consultancy and want to focus on taking over a competitor. So, your junior employees are now allowed to advise clients. You have trained them, updated employment contracts, and given them the authorisation to sign contracts with clients. Professional indemnity insurance protects you against professional errors, such as wrong advice. Professional indemnity insurance is different from business liability insurance, which mainly applies to business accidents. Indemnity insurance applies in cases where you make a mistake on the job. So in this case, wrong advice.

The entrepreneurs behind Quatt decided to delegate early on. Read about their success story.

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