Few businesses are dependent on the owner alone. One of the hardest things about growth is finding good help but even once you found good help, your management of them will dictate how well they and your company do.
Having worked on both sides of the employer-employee relationship, I know it can be hard to find the right balance. But enabling employees to truly thrive can make all the difference and be the reason your business excels where others fall short.
Take care of your employees and they will take care of your company. This gets into a lot of psychology and may seem too mushy, but a lot of how well an employee does for you depends on how well you treat them.
Nothing pushes good employees away faster than being disrespected. This can be as simple as blatantly verbally abusing them, but it is often much more subtle. Most people just want to be heard, they want to be understood, they want to feel like they can contribute. This doesn’t mean you have to go around doing whatever your employees say, it can be as simple as listening. Even if it doesn’t change what you end up doing, the few minutes it took to listen to them can completely change their perspective of you and your business. And it’s not uncommon at all for employees who have different backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives to come up with something that can legitimately improve your business. One place I worked at have seven spreadsheets and Word documents they used to manage their clients and files. I was able to combine ALL of them into one spreadsheet that did everything that was previously done by seven different files. I spoke to one of my managers before I did it, he agreed, I combined them and showed him the result, and that was that. Now the business was that much more efficient and simplified.
And this goes beyond just how you speak to them or hearing them out. They are all people. They all have personal lives, families, hobbies, interests, challenges, etc. I can tell you right now that the main reason they work for you is to get paid. They aren’t there for some higher calling to work for you. There may be something comparable to that in what attracts them to that industry or that type of position, but at the end of the day, they’re there for the pay. Don’t believe me? Stop paying them and see how many still come in. So make sure your business is a place of opportunity for them, a place of respect, a place where they’ll be happy or at least comfortable enough to stick around and do a good job at for years to come. If not, you are far from the only place they can get a paycheck at.