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Sometimes it’s the Little Things that Win Worker Loyalty
By Richard Hadden and Bill Catlette
Sculpting classes, BMW Z3's, and pet insurance – yes, pet insurance. These are just a few of the amenities being offered by labor hungry employers in the escalating bidding wars for top talent.
Outlandish perks make for great ad copy, but do they lift their weight in motivating and retaining top talent?
One pattern has emerged among contenders for the nation's workforce: money and perks attract; strong and caring leadership retains.
So what can you do if you're not a Fortune 500 corporation or you don't have the resources (or inclination) to build a corporate basketball court?
Sometimes, it's the little things that count.
Like just knowing your employees' names. The fast-food business experiences, on average, a turnover rate of roughly 300% a year among its part-time frontliners. At a national chain airport pizzeria during the busy holiday travel season, the manager was trying to get the attention of a young man filling up drink cups. Gesturing toward the well groomed kid, the manager said to the employee next to him, ``What's that one's name?" That one? Has the manager had to hire so many new faces that he can't identify one from the other? When he handed me my root beer, I casually asked the young man how long he'd been there. He rolled his eyes heavenward. ``A little over a week," he said. ``It feels like forever."
A multi-billion dollar firm has for years experienced turnover in excess of 70% among its newly hired sales reps, despite a growing goodie-bag of bonuses and benefits. Because of the exceptionally high "body count," company insiders openly admit that "we don't really bother getting to know them all that well because they're not going to be here very long." Hello??! Better look inside your own organization for signs of similar attitudes.
They may seem like ``little things", but they can absolutely mean the difference in whether or not someone really extends themselves for you and your organization.
Art Seessel, President of Memphis-based Seessel's Supermarkets, regularly takes time to send personal congratulatory notes to his employees for their "off-hours" accomplishments. One such note went to a part-time produce clerk, congratulating him on his high school athletic accomplishments.
For years, Lucille Packard (widow of HP's David) personally shopped for and bought small presents commemorating employee weddings and childbirths. In both cases the message is clear: we see our employees as more than merely a pair of hands sorting produce or assembling printers.
Joe was growing weary of the long weeks away from his fiance required by his high-tech job. Although he loved his career, and the perks his company offered, he was looking around for something that would keep him closer to home. While working with his boss on a critical project in Vermont he became seriously ill. His boss and the hotel manager found him passed out with a raging fever on the bathroom floor, where he'd been for more than 12 hours. The emergency room doctor told the boss that Joe was dangerously dehydrated from the flu. ``He'll be alright, but he's still not fully conscious. It was touch and go for a while there." The boss was new to the group, and while he knew Joe was engaged, he hadn't pried into the details on the bride-to-be. Putting the project on hold, he spent the rest of the day trying to figure out how to contact Joe's finance. That evening, he finally reached her. By that time she was frantic from Joe's uncharacteristic failure to call or return her calls.
The next morning, she was on a plane to Vermont, compliments of the company. It was that ``little thing" that renewed Joe's commitment to the people he worked for.
Thong Lee, a former laundry worker and now a bartender at the Seattle Marriott will likely never forget the day that his boss, Sandy Olson, shut down the hotel's laundry for an entire day so the whole staff could attend his mother's funeral. Today, Lee proudly proclaims that he ``puts on this uniform", just like an NBA player.
As managers, it's intoxicating to be impressed with our own power and control, and to lord that control over underlings. We may feel we can buy workers' loyalty and commitment by piling on more and more of the things that make us feel we ``own" them. But Major General Melvin Zais, former commander of the 101st Airborne Division in Vietnam, who had little use for or access to fancy frills in the bush of southeast asia, said it best in a speech to military students after his retirement: ``I enjoin you to be ever alert to the pitfalls of too much authority. Beware that you do not fall in the category of the little man with a little job, with a big head. In essence, be considerate, treat your subordinates right, and they will literally die for you."
Maybe they're not such little things after all.
Please print the following attribution for this article: Bill Catlette and Richard Hadden, co-authors of Contented Cows Give Better Milk, help clients clobber the competition by having a focused, fired up, and capably led workforce. They deliver powerful conference keynotes and leadership training. They can be reached at 800-940-7006 (+1-904-720-0870 from outside North America) or www.ContentedCows.com.