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Last month's column explained how being a good employer translates to higher profits, business sustainability, and improved customer satisfaction. This month we continue with more tips on how to be a good employer.
Conduct Exit Interviews
Do your best to determine why an employee has chosen to leave your company. By delving beneath the surface to uncover the root cause for departure, you can gain insight for hiring a replacement, and possible clues on how to stop other valued employees from leaving. The intelligence you gather may even give you the opportunity to fix adverse factors that may be unnecessarily driving employees away.
When hiring, it provides useful insight into candidates to ask their reasons for leaving past employers. Special care is required to determine their real reasons for leaving, since employees are sometimes reticent about their true motives. Initially, they will often cite compensation as the key factor, when more often it turns out to be their incompatibility with either the corporate philosophy or the company's way of doing business.
Recognize and Reward Performance
For motivated employees, a paycheck alone is often not sufficient reward. Notice and recognition for doing an exceptional job are the incentives they need to invest extra effort, raise their work standard, and embrace the company's goals. Recognition programs also translate into increased loyalty and retention, as well as profits, since research shows a direct link between employee and customer satisfaction, and between customer satisfaction and financial gain.
One way to acknowledge your staff's contributions is with tangible rewards dispensed through a creative compensation plan. The plan offers raises, commissions, bonuses, or gifts tied to achievement. The prize does not need to be monetary. For staff who take pride in their work, public recognition can be the sweetest reward.
It is important to acknowledge the contribution to peers and significant others as well. By making a formal presentation or posting congratulations, you demonstrate that the company cares about employees' efforts. A thank you note to families lets them know the employee is valued, and reinforces your appreciation for the time and hard work top performers have contributed.
Provide Professional Development
Enable people to succeed by giving them the professional training necessary to do their jobs. At the same time, training acknowledges an employee's value to your company, and recognizes that you have a future together. The best employees seek opportunities for challenge or advancement. Without the chance to assume new responsibilities or work on new teams, committees, or projects, they may feel they are stagnating and move on. People are motivated to work for—and stay with—companies that nurture their careers.
Mind the Physical Environment
Functional work spaces, adequate lighting, and appropriate safety and environmental conditions can boost performance. In an industry that operates 24/7, employees' safety getting to and from the building is also a factor.
Use Humor
Some organizations have devalued humor and laughter at work, seeing them as unprofessional or unproductive. A recent study of financial institutions found managers who facilitated the highest level of employee performance used humor the most often.
Physically, laughter has been proven to lower blood pressure, oxygenate the blood (increasing energy), relax muscles, and stimulate production of endorphins. Psychologically, appropriate workplace humor promotes self-detachment, emotional and mental flexibility, problem solving, and improved morale. It can also serve to break the ice, soften criticism or conflict, and strengthen staff relationships.
Arnold Kahn is president of PrintLink, North America's leading professional placement firm specializing in the graphic communications industry. You can contact PrintLink at (800) 867-3463 or visit www.printlink.com.
author: By Arnold Kahn