How to Treat Employees

It is often mistaken that the President or CEO of the company is the most important person in a company. The person who has the most responsibility in a company should be the least important person. That person should be able to be hit by a bus at any point in time and the company should be able to continue to function with minimal disruption. This is part of the philosophy of the Inverted Pyramid. 

A traditional pyramid has a wide base of stones on the bottom and gets narrower as you go up until there is a solitary block on the top.  This is how most companies are created, with a solid foundation of “lower level” employees who do the grunt work, and as you climb the ladder of position, there are fewer and fewer employees until you reach the top where you find a President/CEO/Owner/Cock of the Walk who believes that they are the single most important person in the world.  The simple fact is that this philosophy is just plain wrong. 

The Inverted Pyramid shows us that the solitary person is actually on the bottom of the chain of importance.  As you go up the pyramid, you are spreading out into the lower levels of management until you get to the lowest level of employee – your field employees – who are really the most important people in your company. The people who have the daily interactions with your customers, the people who go out and sell or install the products and services, those people are the ones who make things happen, they are the ones who earn you money – without them, there simply is no company.  Everyone else is there to serve and support them, to make their lives easier, to ensure that they are taken care of. If those employees did everything perfectly every day, you would not need their supervisors. If their supervisors did everything perfect every day, you would not need the next tier supervisors, and so on. 

Knowing this, why is it that we do not treat these people like the gold that they are? It should go without saying that these employees are simply the most important asset that your company has. You invest time and money in their training, you invest in their tools, in their PPE, in their certifications, yet we want to hire them for as little money as possible and give them the bare minimum benefits we can and expect them to be happy and stay. We give bonuses to their managers but not to them. We give accolades to the supervisors but not to the subordinates when their projects come in on time or under budget. What this is - is wrong, simply wrong.

Let’s start by just hiring better people. Personally, I do not believe in minimum wage.  Nobody should make less than a livable wage – even if it is their first job or they are in High School; we simply do not have any positions that do work worth less than that amount of compensation. If we have interns, we will even pay them like anyone else, even if they expected it to be an unpaid internship, because unpaid internships are simply wrong and abusive. If you are looking at a candidate and you tell yourself “you know, I just don’t think they are worth a living wage,” then what you are saying is that “I should not hire this person,” not, “I should pay them a sub-human wage."

Thinking about your employees, if you expect them to deliver 100% all the time, then you are a fool. Start by taking 110% out of your vocabulary, people cannot give you more than 100%, it is literally impossible, if you do not understand, watch a lot of Archer on Netflix or Hulu and you will get an education between the usage of “literally” and “figuratively.” The average worker is at best going to give you their 85%, usually their 65%. You should be hiring people based on them giving you their 65%, and you hired these people because their 65% is better than other people’s 85%.  Now, because you do not push these people to the breaking point every day, day in and day out, when you need them to give you their 85% because of a deadline or a shortage, they are there, ready and willing to give you more, and they have the capacity to do so. 

Your office staff is support staff. Their job is to SUPPORT the FIELD staff. That includes your sales staff and the installers. Everything they do, every policy they make, should be done with the thought of making the lives of those in the field easier. Unless it concerns safety or legal compliance, nothing from the office should make it harder for the installers to do their jobs or add work to their load that could be done by your support staff. Every step in your process that you add should be to make it easier and faster for the sales staff to sell a project and get it into production. Remember, these are your most important assets, these are the people who are making you money. You need to do everything you can to make them know it by ensuring their lives are as easy as possible while doing their jobs by having the resources to support them in your office.

A fundamental mistake that has been made in every crew-based atmosphere is that managers interview and hire team members and then assign them to work with a crew.  Team dynamics are exceptionally important and not to be taken lightly. How does someone hire an individual and put them on an established team without the input of that team or their team leader? Have your crew review the resumes, have group interviews, let the crew leader make the hiring decisions. When hiring a new manager, have their subordinates be there for the interview, make sure they are going to be a good fit for them. You already have the rest of the team and we established what they cost and how important they are; don’t you want to be certain that the new person works well and fits in well? Why would you force anyone new into your team dynamic unless it is your intention to shake things up and move people out.

In that same vein, don’t make policy decisions in a vacuum. If it is going to affect your crew, then you need to include them in the decisions. It doesn’t have to be all of them, but grab a handful of key people and ask them to be involved in the decision-making process. If you are changing a travel policy, get a couple installers, a lead installer, and some other people that will be impacted and have them help create the new system.  Just like involving them in the hiring process, this will give them buy-in to what is going on and to your company process, you will also have allies if not everyone likes the changes and they can explain the thought process and reasons that went into the policy. These things are not trivial, and the few hours you spend paying these employees to be involved in these kinds of decisions is well worth the return in their longevity. 

So, we have established that these people are a valuable asset to you and you have invested a lot of time and money in them – so let’s try to do something novel like keep them, well, let’s keep the good ones. Treat your employees like gold, plain and simple.  Give them great benefits – more than the industry standard, more than you have to, more than is normal.  Realize that if all you are concerned with is your bottom line, all you will be left with is a continual revolving door of mediocre employees always looking for their next opportunity. Give them the little things, show them that you care, give bonuses to everyone, not just your managers, give extra time off, give them paid holidays, give them a better insurance plan & pay for more of it. Make sure that you know what is going on in their lives and what they need.  Know what motivates each of them – not everyone is the same.  For some of your crew, having the best and newest tools is going to make them work so much harder, while another person might really want some additional time off to spend with their family.  Treat them like the unique human beings they are and show them how much they mean to you so that they stay with you for a career and not a job. 

Lastly, listen to your employees. If you have people who are towing the line or who do not appreciate all of the things you are doing for them, do not keep them around. Cut out the cancer in your organization, don’t let it fester and pull the rest of it down.  When you have good people working hard for you, make certain that they are not brought down by the bad attitudes and performance of others. Don’t keep the manager who treats their team like garbage, don’t keep the one employee who is always late or always leaves early. Don’t fall susceptible to the Peter Principal, or believe that because an employee did something amazing for you in the past that you have to be beholden to them forever. Treating your employees well and even like family, does not mean that you keep them forever no matter what. Even if your company would never have gotten to the place it is without them does not mean that you will get to the place you need to be with them. Some people are right for the time and place your company is now, but not for where your company is going, and trying to force them into the next level is not just bad for you, but bad for everyone, including them. While sports analogies are trite, you can be the best quarterback in the league for five straight seasons, but if you haven’t thrown a touchdown in a year, how important are you to the team now? This is advice always easier to give than to follow, but it is one of the most important items to remember, because everyone in the company watches those who should have been left behind with contempt as they work harder and harder to pay for their salaries in addition to their own.