April 15, 2010
What Happens When Your Workers Aren’t Working?
Maybe It Isn’t the Employee – Maybe It’s You
No one comes to work for us because they want to be a failure, and no one comes in each morning with the intention of doing a bad job,” Shay says. No situation is entirely black and white, and if your attitude is “my way or the highway,” it isn’t the best way to run your business, he warns.
When things aren’t going smoothly, try looking at your management style. If you’re not getting the most from your staff, here are some suggestions:
• Focus on things you can control. You can’t change the inherent attitude of people. Some will be adaptive, while others will never change their outlook. Spend your resources on things you can change.
• Learn to delegate. Hire people, and then let them do the job they were hired to do. At the same time, be sure to make the most of their skills. “Have you ever hired a Michelangelo, and then told him to paint the chapel grey?” Shay asks.
• Do employees know why they should do things? “Saying ‘because’ doesn’t work on anyone except children,” Shay says. Employees work better if they know how their tasks fit into the business overall.
• Do they know how to do things? Even experienced employees may run into tasks they’ve never done before. Don’t assume that people know how your company operates. Shay tells the story of a man in one of his seminars who didn’t know what “SKU” stood for. He’d grown up in the family business and heard it all his life, but no one had ever stopped and explained it to him.
• Do they know what they’re supposed to do? “There’s nothing wrong with priorities,” Shay says. “The most important is someone in the store, then phone calls, then merchandise, then cleaning, and so on. [In my store] we would see who could go the longest without saying a dumb phrase like ‘can I help you’—don’t ask, just help the customer. We’d make up lists—if you sell one item, what can you sell that complements it? And are your employees telling customers about what’s new in the store?”
• Are you checking on the progress of a task? Don’t wait until a job is done. “Check the progress and stop the task if it’s going the wrong way. Give the instruction and then keep coming back to make sure it’s done right. Don’t hover, but make sure the job doesn’t have to be torn down and restarted.”
• Watch for the “big hat.” This can be a real problem when employees decide what their job entails, and consider any other tasks to be beneath them or not their responsibility. Instead of doing whatever needs to be done, they put on the “big hat” and do something else to look busy.
“There is no need or place for hats in our business,” Shay says. “Whatever the task at hand, that is the hat that should be put on.” And that means the boss jumping in whenever something must be done, too, which sets an example for everyone. That could be the change in your business that really turns it all around. | 
Jil McIntosh
