To Sell More Goods and Services,
Sell To Your Employees First

Although inflation and interest rates are consistently ranked as the top threats facing small businesses today, finding and keeping good employees is often next. And while that may not help with interest rates, it could help with inflation and other costs in lots of ways. Good employees can increase your revenue and other positives.

To succeed in today’s environment, you need to create a business culture that attracts prospective employees and helps keep them. Paying what they are worth is important, but so is creating a positive environment. This is an environment where your employees feel supported and valued, and see an opportunity for a healthy work-life balance. This is especially important with younger generations and in today’s tight labor market.

Easy to Miss

Many businesses can be excused for not seeing this. A lot of the ingredients are not intuitive. You may need to put yourself in the shoes of someone half your age. You may have to budget more for payroll. It ain’t easy, but you might have a secret, low-cost weapon.

This can be found by focusing on your “business culture.” A good example involves your long-term strategies, your Big Plan! While these are well and good – they’re probably outlined in your business plan – they’re not worth much unless your office or plant culture supports it. In other words, most of your team must share your goals. Otherwise, your plan will end up gathering dust, not profit.

Another way of saying this involves the idea of “engagement.” Leading management organizations say about 25 percent of your staff is likely to be engaged, 15 percent disengaged, and some 60 percent in the middle. What this means in daily terms is this: about a fourth of your team want to succeed about as muchy as you do, 15 percent may just not care and even work against you, and 60 percent are in the middle, likely to follow whoever makes the most noise on a given day, including the disengaged.

It may not be obvious or seem too radical, but your best move is to get rid of the 15 percent who are working against you or don’t care about your plans. If you reduce or eliminate their numbers in your firm, the 25 percent who are truly engaged will see you are willing to support loyal workers and the 60 percent in the middle will gravitate toward those who are engaged. You want to make the moves carefully, but otherwise it’s almost a win-win situation.

Of course, employee moral cannot always be catered to, but it should be kept in mind with most, if not all your decisions. If an action is likely to meet resistance or cause resentment, then the reasons for it should be carefully communicated. This is especially true for those identified as staff leaders or office opinion makers.

Find a Way

The worst thing here is time, your time and that of your best leaders. You'll need to address all staff and that's best done in small groups. But consider this: you might assume that everyone in the office understands proposed changes and why they are necessary. The reality is they probably don’t understand. Worse, they may have heard partial explanations that leave room for negative rumor and guesses.

What you must do is take time to explain these changes and the reasons for them. If it’s a complicated explanation, you might even consider charts and graphs. A clear picture of why something is necessary can literally be worth a thousand words.

There are many possible scenarios, but a key is the realization that you’re dealing with people, not robots. To have engaged workers, you need to engage them.