The thing about employees…

Well, we are nine months into this business effort, and we have learned a couple of things about employees. If you are thinking of starting a business, or have one, our opinions might help…
1. No employee that you hire will ever be as passionate about your business’ success as you are. You can interview a number of people and hire well, but face it, they are not the owners!
2. Even the best employees will typically have other priorities in their lives. They may have a second job, they may be going to school, or they may have children. Whatever else is going on in their lives, you can pretty much bet that your store is not their biggest concern.
3. Even good employees with strong work ethics will not look for ways to perform above and beyond how you have trained them. If you train them well, they will perform well. You cannot expect that they will go looking for additional tasks and responsibilities if you have not put it into writing as an expectation. Owners do that, but employees do not. If you find that you have hired an employee that exhibits owner-like qualities with regard to motivation and performance, pay them well and try to keep them! Basically, remember this: Their goal is to make a few dollars. Your goals are to have friendly, interactive, honest, hard-working, self-motivated, amazing individuals who will do everything and more than you want them to, correctly and quickly every single time without any input from you.
4. So, how do you get the most out of your employees? Here are a few things we have learned.
a. If you find that a new-hire appears to perform in a mediocre way, do not think that they will get better over time. We hire everyone on a 90 day probationary basis. They know that we will evaluate their performance and that we may or may not keep them after the 90 day probationary period (or sooner if things do not look like a good fit). We made the mistake of keeping some average to below-average employees because we had spent time training them. Believe us… if someone is not average or better, cut your losses and move on. Find someone else.
b. Company policies are only respected if you enforce them. Just because it is written down and given to them does not mean that they will adhere to it, or even acknowledge that it exists. We had a no personal internet use policy. It seemed that nearly every employee would get on the internet at the point of sale computer at some point during their shift. If you reminded them of the policy, they would reply with “I’m just checking email” or “It is slow and I don’t have anything else to do.” If you allow that to happen even one time, then your REAL company policy is that internet use is OK. We eventually crashed a point of sale computer because someone downloaded internet gaming software and installed it. I had to replace the computer in order to get our point of sale up and running again. Guess what?? …you cannot sell things without a cash register! As a result, we had a company meeting and clearly told all of our employees that personal internet use is absolutely not allowed, and that it will be a zero tolerance issue resulting in their immediate termination. There, that fixed everything, right? Well, it only took a day or two before I caught an employee on MySpace. He had gathered other employees to show them his profile. So, we not only lost the productivity of one employee, but he had two others gathered around as well. I told him to close the Internet Explorer window and reminded him of our zero tolerance policy we had just reviewed several days before. So I was in a situation where I had to fire someone on the spot, but I started considering impact on the schedule, how would we cover the gaps, how long would it take to hire someone else, what about the lost training time and proficiency this employee had developed over six months… The concerns/thoughts went on and on. I pulled him aside, told him he would absolutely not receive any other chances beyond this one, and told him to go back to work and never use the internet at work again. My actions effectively told him and all of our other employees that our REAL store policy is that we do not have a zero tolerance policy, and that we really don’t have ANY store policies. My concern for impact to the store by losing an employee effectively told everyone that it is just a big free for all… DON’T MAKE THIS MISTAKE IN YOUR STORE! Not long afterward, we found some personal internet material printed on the store laser printer, but the culprit forgot to take his prints! It turned out to be the same person, and we terminated him at that time. Our lessons learned… If you have a store policy (and you will have many), they must be enforced the first time and every time. If your schedule is completely screwed up for awhile, just deal with it. That is better than having every employee think they can do whatever they want.
c. Don’t over pay people to begin with. We wanted to attract and keep quality individuals. We decided that higher pay rates would help accomplish this more than anything else. Minimum wage is $6.85 per hour. We started people with no coffee shop experience at $7.50 to $8.50 an hour. People with coffee house experience got $8.50 to $9.50 an hour. There, now we have a great staff, and they will all appreciate their pay rates and do a great job for us in return, right? Oh yeah, and we will never have any turnover, correct? WRONG… When you work with people over years and years, you get to the point where you can interview and hire pretty well. Does that mean everyone will be a great hire? No. Will everyone perform up to the expectations and potential they exhibited through their interview and past experience on their resume? No. We ended up paying people way more than they were worth. Our new strategy is to bring people on in the $6.85 to $7.50 range and test them out. If they turn out to be great employees, you can always give them a raise. It they turn out to be average performers, you will regret paying them more than they are worth, and lowering their pay is not really an option. If they are sub-par, get rid of them as soon as possible. Don’t try to “fix” a sub-par employee. Additional training and time on the job will not improve their character or their work ethic.
d. Expectations, expectations, expectations… First of all, don’t expect employees to read your mind. The level of effort that you put in as a business owner will not be replicated by your employees. Even the good ones just don’t have the same investment in the business that you have. That doesn’t mean they are not good employees, it just means that they are not owners. OK, so we should give our employees verbal direction, and that will fix everything, right? No. You can lay out your expectations verbally, and you will be lucky if 5% of it sticks. Even the best employees will not remember and implement your verbal instructions. I have found that detailed duty rosters work pretty well. We have an opening duty roster, a mid-day duty roster, and a closing duty roster. At first, we tried making the lists of responsibilities and tasks and just posting them. OK, now the shop will run at the utmost efficiency, with the highest possible employee productivity now, right? Absolutely not. We found that we had to constantly refer our employees to the duty rosters to keep them busy. It is amazing how many people would be willing to spend hours on end just standing at the cash register and do nothing except trade money with people. If there is a lull in customers, they are mostly willing to politely stand there and wait for the next one, no matter how long it might be. Wow, that is true dedication to customer service, isn’t it? We found that reminding certain employees 20 or 30 times a day to do something productive by reviewing the duty rosters gets frustrating after, oh, maybe a few minutes… So, the best way to utilize a duty roster is to have people initial for completed tasks, and to verify that the tasks have been completed by inspecting the results. The duty rosters are like company policies. If you do not actively enforce them, then they cease to exist in the eyes of most employees.
e. Don’t promise employees a specific number of scheduled hours. If you have a gap in your schedule that needs filled, and it will take 24 hours per week to fill that gap, don’t tell the new employee that those 24 hours are theirs. Remember, they are in a probationary period! Hire them and schedule them for the 24 hours, but if their performance is not good enough, cut the hours back and fill them with someone else. Even if you have a good employee who performs well and is filling 36 hours a week in your schedule, do not assume that things will always remain the same. They may decide to go back to school and cut their availability. If they are truly a quality employee, you can expect your customers to try to recruit them. If something enticing pops up, you can bet that they will go do it. You may lose them, or they may just want to cut their hours. We award hours on the schedule based upon performance. Perform well = lots of hours. Perform poorly, and we cut hours until they decide to go and find somewhere else to work.
Well, I’m sure I could spill more of my thoughts on employees into this blog, but I need to get some other things done. One last thing, though… The above issues do not apply to everyone. You will find some great people, and they will be a joy to work with. You will also find some people who interview well, and turn out to be the bane of your existence! If you have a bad hire, don’t get concerned about it. Let them go, or cut their hours until they quit (that would be the non-confrontational way). Also, great employees will sometimes fail you, and crummy employees will sometimes make you proud. If you expect a staff to perform wonderfully, with little or no input, you will have many headaches. You have to realize that you must manage your staff, daily, sometimes hourly. Get used to it, or you will be miserable.
Later,
JD