Employee Motivation
The Dynamic Manager’s Handbook On
How To Manage And Motivate
by Dave Donelson
Donelson SDA, Inc.
Copyright 2011 Dave Donelson
Smashwords Edition
ISBN: 9781466019072
A note from the author
The Dynamic Manager Handbooks are for entrepreneurs, managers, and others who want to succeed in small business by learning more about management techniques, operations, and best practices. Each volume in the collection is devoted to a single topic. The material was extracted from the Dynamic Manager Guides, my series of books based on my experiences as a business journalist, consultant, and entrepreneur.
Table Of Contents
Chapter 1- First Things First For New Hires
Chapter 2 - Making The Good Great By Training Them
Chapter 3 - Should You Bribe Or Bully Your Team?
Chapter 4 - Fire ‘Em Up or Fire ‘Em?
Chapter 5 - Case Study: Retail Employee Motivation De-Mystified
Chapter 6 - Case Study: Tune Up Your Auto Service Technicians
Chapter 7 - Solving the Problem Of Problem Employees
Chapter 8 - Do You Need A Second-in-Command?
First Things First For New Hires
A new employee is like someone going on a first date, according to Wayne Price, owner of Superior Auto Restyling. “Everybody combs their hair, ties their shoelaces, and tucks their shirt in so they look pretty,” he says. “After a couple of weeks, though, the dirty laundry starts showing up.” Price has three locations with about 55 employees in New York.
That’s why a 90-day trial period is common practice for most small businesses when they hire someone new. During that time, the company owner has a chance to train and evaluate the employee on several different levels and the employee can size up the situation to see if that’s what they really want to do for a living. Usually, the terms of employment during the trial period provide a measure of protection for the shop in case things don’t work out. It’s a good, solid policy that most business owners swear by.
You can break the 90-day trial period into three phases, although they may overlap depending on how your company operates. First is the orientation, where you acquaint the new hire with the way you do business. Next comes training, which both defines the employee’s job and gives them the skills to do it the way you want it done. Finally comes evaluation, when you (and the employee) decide whether your relationship is going to continue and under what terms. Some shops follow strict procedures complete with checklists, forms, manuals, and formal skills tests; others approach the process a little more loosely. The most important thing is to let the employee know what’s going on and why so they understand the importance of their performance.
Orientation
Orientation can take a few minutes or a few days. The first thing you need to do is lay out your company’s policies on such things as working hours, lunch hours and breaks, sick days, pay schedules, insurance and other benefits, and all the other minutiae of employment—and how all those things will change after the first 90 days. If you have a comprehensive employee manual, great. If not, try to have as much as possible in written form to minimize misunderstandings, especially about pay practices and benefits. Give ample time for plenty of questions to be asked and answered.
Don’t just stick to the numbers, either. You should also lay down a few pretty specific guidelines about appearance (hair, clothes, personal hygiene) and conduct (profanity, smoking, cell phone use). You’ll want to spell out your business policies—how you deal with customer complaints, returns, credits and exchanges, delivery dates, price negotiation, whatever else matters in the business. It’s also useful for the new employee to hear a little company history and to get a feel for how you expect the staff to treat customers, each other, and you.
Training
Some of these things overlap into the training phase. Semantics aside, you can break employee training down into two parts, with differing weights depending on the person’s job description. First is product knowledge, particularly important, of course, if your shop sells retail, but also for technicians who may be asked by a customer to compare one product to another. You won’t expect a new hire to immediately memorize your inventory or product catalog, but they should at least learn where it is and how to use it. It doesn’t hurt for them to know the competitive advantages of your principle lines, too, and what benefits they deliver to the customer. Every employee is a sales person in some way.
The second type of training is skills acquisition. Don’t assume the employee knows anything about anything. Even if they’ve worked in your industry for years, their last employer may have done things completely differently from you. Also, unless you tested their skills as part of the interviewing process, you can’t take their word for what they know and what they don’t. The best way to teach job skills is to concentrate on process—how the job gets done, step by step—showing them each move, then letting them do it until they get it right before you go on to the next one.
Evaluation
This all leads up to the final phase of the 90-day period: evaluation. The whole point of the process isn’t to teach the new hire everything there is to know about your company in three months. It’s to see if they have the ability and willingness to learn those things after the trial period is over. You can test their skills and product knowledge. You should also, though, carefully observe them as they go about their duties throughout the period. Do they play well with others? Do they respect the workplace?
Here is a sample check list of questions to ask yourself as you evaluate a new hire:
Do they listen and follow instructions?
Do they seek help if needed?
How well do they accept criticism?
Do they get along with others?
Do they have any irritating habits?
Does their work habits change when unsupervised?
How do they fill unassigned time?
Are they eager for more responsibility?
Do you trust them?
Do they bring personal problems to work?
As Price points out, “Even beyond knowing if they can do the job, you want to see what happens when they mix with the other employees, if they show up for work on time, do they eat lunch or do something else.”
Making The Good Great By Training Them
Business owners invest in many things: inventory, advertising, shop fixtures, computer systems, even buildings and land. Few investments have the potential for higher returns, however, than those made in staff training. Compared to the average worker, a skilled, educated employee generates more sales, makes fewer costly mistakes, and nurtures greater customer loyalty.
Those skills sometimes come from prior experience, but most good business owners don’t count on previous employers to do their training for them. They make it standard practice to invest in their employees by training them, both when they are newly hired and throughout their careers.
The skills covered by most companies fall into three areas: product knowledge, operations, and retail selling techniques.
Product Knowledge
“It’s very important to us to make sure that our sales staff is very knowledgeable in the crafts that we sell,” says Allyson Strowbridge, Marketing Director of The Real Mother Goose, an arts and crafts company which has three Portland, Oregon locations with over 10,000 square feet of retail space and about thirty-five employees. At least 90% of their employees have received some training throughout the course of their career with the gallery, according to Strowbridge.
When a new salesperson is hired, Strowbridge says, “They watch videos, they read quite a lot of written material about the items that we sell, the processes the artists go through, the materials that are used. Videos are informative pieces that we have on the art of glassblowing or various practices with ceramics, for instance.” Some artists provide videos, too.
“It’s important that the customers know that our employees know what they’re talking about,” agrees Wendy Dunham, co-owner of Carlyn Galerie in Dallas, Texas, with her mother, Cindi Ray. “We take employees to local shows or glass-blowing studios so they can keep up to date about the artists and how they do their work. It’s so much easier to tell the customer when you can appreciate what the artist has done and you know the artist and have a story about them.”
Strowbridge adds that the owners of The Real Mother Goose, Stan and Judy Gillis, urge employees to attend trade events as part of their training. “There is money in the budget for some employees to attend conferences and meetings that would add value to their job performance,” she says. Local craft fairs and shows are training opportunities, too, she points out, and they offer excellent value because there is usually no cost involved. “Attendance is encouraged because it adds to their knowledge base.”
Business Operations
In this day when everything from inventory to customer relations is managed through computer systems, it’s more important than ever that employees know how to use the digital tools that are the backbone of many business operations. Brenda Leder, owner of By Hand South, a fifteen-year-old art gallery in Decatur, Georgia, says she turned to the consultant who installed their computer’s software for employee training. “We did it after work in the evenings,” when the system was first installed, she said, “then the consultant was here off and on and we’d all gather around and learn.” It’s an on-going process, Leder observes, whenever the software is upgraded.
The Real Mother Goose does all operations training at their main location for the sake of uniformity, according to Strowbridge. “We usually have everyone work at our downtown store at least a couple of times before we send them off to another location,” she says. “We like to do it that way so people can get familiar with the business end of things.”
Sales Techniques
Karen Rotenberg, owner of Alianza Contemporary Crafts in Boston, Massachusetts, emphasizes professional customer relations when training a new employee for her 1,200 square-foot gallery. Working with the gallery manager, she says, “the new people observe carefully how customers are handled, how they are treated, and how the work is presented to the customer. Some of this you can tell the person about, but if they can observe it done in ways that are successful and meaningful to the work, I’ve always found that’s the best way.”
There are many lessons the employee hopefully learns this way, Rotenberg says: “One thing that should be taught to every salesperson is that every customer should be greeted and made to feel comfortable” when they enter the gallery. “Then there is the issue of over-servicing the customer and not giving them the opportunity to look around and observe the works on the own. You need to maintain a balance between providing enough information and not too much.”
“We usually have a new hire shadow one of the sales people,” Strowbridge agrees, although she says The Real Mother Goose assumes they have selling skills already since most new hires have some retail sales experience when they are hired.
When it comes to selling skills, none of the galleries we talked to bring in any outside help to train employees, relying instead on managers and experienced staff members to convey their knowledge to other members of the staff. “When you have somebody that’s worked for you for a long period of time, they become the ultimate trainer,” says Rotenberg.
“The other thing that’s very important is to listen to the customer,” Rotenberg adds. “As much as you try to inform them, they can inform you, too.”
Employees aren’t the only ones who can benefit from a learning experience, either. As Wendy Dunham says, “We represent over 400 artists, and it’s one of those things where, every single day, employees are learning new things. I’m learning things every day as well.”
Regardless of how it’s done, whether employees study literature and videos supplied by the company’s suppliers, take computer lessons supplied by a vendor, or shadow and observe experienced employees, most business owners would agree that the time and money spent on staff training is an investment that pays off in the long term.