Most businesses have tools, equipment, materials, and processing that serve to move the business forward toward success. A lot of these businesses also claim that their greatest resource is their employees, but that claim doesn't always show through. The people in the organization are often replaced with someone new when their performance falters. Just like a piece of equipment, business leaders simply throw out a person that isn't performing up to snuff and believe that replacing them with another, newer model, might solve the issue.
If You Don't Work, You Don't Eat
I am not trying to say that you should hold onto an employee who isn't performing after every effort has been made to train them and find out why their knowledge, skills, and talents are not serving them in their current position. By all means, send them down the road if they are not doing their job. Florida is an at-will state meaning you can fire an employee based on hair color, (please don't do that though--always document an employee's lack of performance and keep an accurate record before you terminate their employment), and stand firm in the stance that if your employees don't work, they don't eat. That means that if they don't work out, do them and yourself a favor and fire them.
But if you've conducted due diligence and vetted your employees, you should already know that you want to try to salvage them whenever possible. If an employee isn't performing up to snuff, take the time to assess why performance may be dwindling. Stay in constant communication with your team members and find out all you can about them--why they are working at your business, what their dreams are, what their family is like, what really gets their creative juices flowing at work--all important factors to understand so you can provide the kind of training and counseling they may need to improve performance.
It's Cheaper to Keep Them
Since business leaders look at the bottom line, understand the costs involved with replacing an employee. The current stats show that it will cost you on average six to nine months salary to replace an employee. So if you have an employee making $40,000 per year, it will cost you $20,000 to $30,000 in recruiting and training expenses. That's pretty expensive! If you're curious, it's not that difficult to figure it out. Based on your attracting, interviewing, screening, hiring, training, and orientation costs, you can rack up a pretty hefty sum. If you want to play with the numbers, use this calculator to determine your costs for replacing an employee.
Begin Today
Beginning this week, make an effort to spend extra time with each employee and find out what makes them tick. You can do this without violating any employment laws simply by taking them for coffee and talking with them. And by the way, this little exercise of being human and paying attention to your team members has an added benefit: the employees begin to notice you are paying closer attention to them and you will gradually notice employee engagement increase.
