Employees - Your most valuable asset
- by Dave Love
There’s no doubt that people are the single most important asset of any business.
Good people are absolutely crucial to achieving success in an intensively service oriented business.
This leads me to the $64,000 question; Where do you find (and how do you keep) good people? Particularly, skilled people who have a desire to learn, people who are willing to accept remodeling’s (or any other business) many and varied challenges?
Finding and hiring good people can be difficult for a number of reasons.
First most of us have very little (if any) training in the art and science of interviewing and selecting new employees. Furthermore, when we really need someone, we’re usually too busy to dedicate as much attention as we should to the task.
I’d like to share with you some of the more common mistakes that I’ve made during the past 25 years; some of these of these were the most expensive mistakes that I’ve ever made. I’ve often tried to fix blame on the poor labor pool that was available at the time; however, each time I look closely at how I went about hiring, I find that the entire blame fell right at my feet.
Timing Is Everything
The most common mistake involves timing: Not knowing when to hire a new person. This is doubly difficult to the relative uncertainty of accurately business opportunities. And unfortunately, uncertainty generally leads to indecision. In turn, this indecision leads to overwork and frustration by the owner, which inevitably can lead to a bad decision.
How many employees have been hired based solely on one of these three emotional decisions:
1. You weren’t really looking to hire anyone, and the business was doing pretty darn good. But you met a person who seemed to be the type of person who could fit right into the company, a person who would require little or no time to learn to be effective, and who could take some of your work load immediately.
You mistakenly believed that the company would grow and prosper around this person, and everyone would be happy. Wrong!
2. You suddenly became extremely busy and you desperately need additional help now. You can’t (or don’t) take the time to explore all your options to make certain you find the best person for the position, someone whose personality and appearance blends with the company’s personality and who either has the skills that you need or has the desire to learn those skills. You hurry through several interviews and hire the first person that indicates that he or she would take the job. You complain to anyone who will listen that you can no longer find any good people. To make matters worse, you do not (or cannot) invest time to properly tutor them in the ways you expect and need them to get their job done. Worse still, there’s no company procedure in place for regular employee job evaluations, so you haven’t conducted a job evaluation with the new employee in more than nine months.
Why do we do these things with the most expensive investment we’re likely to make in our business? Where is our time better spent? I feel the largest segment or our time should be directed toward helping our employees become the best they can become. When an employee becomes the best they can be, they enjoy a much higher level of job satisfaction. This is a win-win situation.
3. You’ve done everything right: You’ve accurately forecasted the flow of new projects coming into the company; you identified precisely the position you want to fill. You’ve written a thorough job description and have advertised for someone with those qualifications. To your surprise, you have several good candidates scheduled for interviews. However, you blow all the interviews by monopolizing and controlling the entire interview process with your unabashed enthusiasm about the future of the remodeling business in general and your own company in particular. You never ask the applicants the right questions and never truly discover who is the best candidate for the job. Ultimately, you hire your gut hunch.
Three months later, that person is gone and you’re feeling that no one wants to work anymore.
Do any of these examples sound familiar? If they don’t, you’re far better at finding good people than I. I’ve been guilty of all of them, and more than once.
Because most of us operate a relatively small business, every person who joins the company will play a vital role in its success or failure. I have always felt that hiring a person to join our company carries an enormous responsibility. And this responsibility is to help them become the best they can become. If they fail, it’s certainly not their fault; it’s mine and mine alone. If they failed, then it was I who failed them by not having the skills necessary to bring them to the best of their abilities. Think of employees as the same type of investment as a new house or three new trucks. When you think about it, they amount to the same type of financial commitment.
This article was taken from the September 1995 issue of “Qualified Remodeler” written by Dave Love
(Don – It took a lot of passion and courage for Mr. Love to be so honest about how he feels about his employees and even more so to admit his weaknesses.
The only thing that has changed since the article was written in 1995 is a far greater need for helping people become the best they can be. Our business, indicated by its name, The People Company, is dedicated to helping people become the best that they can be so that individuals, families, companies and communities can be the best that they can be.)
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