How to Keep Your Employees: Part One
How to Keep Your Employees: Part One
How to Keep Your Employees: Part One
Every year businesses spend huge amounts of money recruiting, interviewing, equipping, and training new employees. Many of these new hires are replacements for old hands who have left for greener pastures. The recruiting costs are easily counted. But how about the costs of lost productivity and the lost customers who moved to along with the old employee? Another hidden cost is an angry employee can poison a work environment for months or years before he has finally had enough, and leaves.
What can a business owner or manager do to cut these replacement costs? That's easy: Cut turnover. But now we must get away from numbers and into the realm of people. That is where things become messy.
Managers often fail to realize that the people under them are motivated by many different factors. People who are interested in being in charge, building a business, or earning lots of money gravitate into upper management. They are hard chargers who put their jobs first. And such people are valuable to any company.
But workers almost always have other things that motivate them, and the conflict comes when management tries to motivate their employees with the rewards which make managers happy instead of the things which make their workers happy.
Sometimes it is easy for a manager to focus on the business instead of the people who build that business. He or she will see employees as just numbers, a fixed cost, replaceable parts of the whole.
So you managers must talk to your subordinates. Find out what makes them tick. One might be an avid fisherman, another a gardener, or a weekend race car builder. Realize that for the majority of your employees, their job is not the number one thing in their lives. For almost all of your employees, time off is the greatest perk. It's even more desirable than bonuses.
Then there are those who want overtime; who need overtime. Too many managers try to "make everything fair" and spread the overtime around. All this does is anger both groups. The ones who need overtime want more and all the others are angry about missing their kid's baseball game.
Then you have the employees that want to be recognized for their good work. An employee can perform heroically for years, and never get noticed by management. He comes in 30 minutes early each day and prepares his work area before he punches in. Yet let him be ten minutes late because his kid was sick, and he'll get a reprimand. This worker has a huge reserve of ill will for the lack of recognition, and that one reprimand will cause him to walk off of the job. And the manager is clueless.
So, how do you as a manager find out these things? You must listen. I must be honest with you; this will be one of the hardest things you have ever had to do. Why? Because you have never been taught to listen. Really listen.
Managers are taught to give directions, counsel wayward workers, and remain aloof from those underneath them. Instead, you must hear what your workers have to say.
Drawing out a worker can be difficult. Remember, your workers have years of practice at hiding their true feelings from management. When you are around, the subject of the conversation changes, the room gets quiet, and your employees become defensive.
How can you get your employees to talk? You must break down that wall that separates you. You must connect on a human-to-human level. And you can do this without losing authority. You must show that you are human and that you will listen.
How does a manager show his workers that he is human? The easiest, cheapest way is to use humor.
Use Humor
Humor is the lubricant to get you close to your workers. Your goal is not to entertain your employees with jokes or funny songs, but to show yourself as a regular person. Here's two suggestions, but use your imagination.
1. Tell a funny story about yourself. For example tell about how you embarrassed yourself slipping on the ice that morning in the parking lot. "I sure hope none of you saw that!" Never make someone else the butt of your joke.
2. Make up funny nicknames for your employees. But make sure that the name is complimentary. You might name a strong warehouse worker "531" because you found out he unloaded 531 crates by hand when a forklift broke down. As you get closer to your employees, one might earn the name "Coach" for coaching his daughter's soccer team to the state finals. Use your imagination.
I'm not asking you to become their best friend. All I am saying is that you must make yourself look human, even if your employees have their doubts. When you have begun to gain their trust, then take Step Two.
The Lunch Bunch
Invite one employee to lunch one day a week. You will learn more about an individual over a meal than almost anywhere else. This is hard wired into the human psyche. Meals are for sharing. It might take more than one lunch to get a worker to talk with you.
When they talk, listen. Listen hard. Most people, especially most managers, don't know how to listen. There is a huge temptation to use the time when you are not talking to formulate your next answer or debate point. Don't be this way. Just suck in the information.
When you really listen, you will find out extraordinary things. You will hear how your workers really feel, what they really value. Keep quiet. Do not defend yourself or the company. Just let them talk.
As soon as you can, after the employee has left, make notes. Extensive notes. Anything that has been told you of a personal nature, keep only to yourself. You don't have to promise the worker that you will be discrete. Just keep your mouth closed. They will know if you have talked or not. This will gain you great trust with your workers. Believe me, they will know.
Most managers spend more time worrying about preventive maintenance of machinery than they do about retention of employees. Implement these tactics of knowing your employees. Afterward, you should have a good handle on what makes your employees tick. With this knowledge, you can motivate them to be the dream employees that will make your numbers and get you that big promotion and bonus.
www.dalanjohnson.com
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