Pizza Parties, Yearly Reviews, and 3%

One of my favorite employees put their two weeks’ notice in this week. Nothing I could do to stop it. Deep down I’m hoping for a miracle, or at least that they will come back at some point. Sometimes you can do everything you can, but in the end, it just doesn’t go the way you want. All of it has made me think a lot about how most places do business. One of the things that I am most proud of is that at the age of twenty, knowing I just didn’t want to do any more school, I got an entry level job and moved up. I had no special skills, I just wanted to work. I got some lucky breaks along the way, not everyone gets the chances I got. In the end, it made me love and admire those people who just work. They don’t want to move up, they don’t want to play games, they just want to work. The older I get, the more value I see in those people. It would be awesome if your team was filled with people who wanted to move up in the company and the rest just wanted to work as hard as they can. I’m afraid we have failed those people. We sell people on tuition reimbursement and tell them that being loyal will be rewarded with promotions. The steady worker who just wants to raise a family and get a paycheck has been forgotten. I guess it’s not right for me to say that they have been forgotten. We actually spend a lot of time talking about them. They come to us and tell us that they don’t have the tools to do their job, we tell them that it’s ok because we are having a pizza party next week to show them that we appreciate them! We say we want loyalty, but that only works on short-term employees. When you have six pizza parties a year and you still haven’t given them what they need to do their job, it just doesn’t work anymore. People crave feedback, people want to know they are valued and appreciated. One-way companies can do that is giving feedback and reviews as often as possible. Some companies have decided that giving a review once a year is good enough. Then they don’t understand when people leave. If you aren’t training leaders to give feedback on a regular basis, and the company isn’t giving a review on a regular basis, people leave. Numbers have always shown that no feedback is worse than negative feedback. I think the story gets worse when you think about the finances. One thing that is very different these days is that you are rewarded for changing jobs on a regular basis. I’ve heard that with the younger generations they usually only stay at a job for around two years. That means that there is less emphasis on yearly raises. That means that part of our job is convincing people that a 2-3% raise is good. That’s a tough conversation to have year after year.

So, What Can You Do?

A benefit of working overnights is that you don’t have as many people around to tell you what to do. That means that you have the freedom to sometimes go off on your own and try some new things. Obviously getting the priorities done still needs to be the main focus, but what about when they are handled? Can you give daily feedback? I think when someone is performing really well you can, but it’s difficult. I think that means that my new goal is to give weekly feedback. The hardest part with positive weekly feedback is trying to come up with different things to say. I just can’t be generic or say the same thing every time. I think it could make things worse if every single Friday at 3:00 am, I went up to someone and said, “great numbers this week”. I think after about three weeks they would start to look at it as a negative. I need to focus on the things that I think are the most important and find ways to bring them up. I’m not sure who said it first, but I love the line, “What gets rewarded get repeated”. I find that to be very true. Also, if someone is doing something negative, hopefully we can find a way to stop it quickly. One of my biggest pet peeves is management who complains in the office about certain behavior but never addresses it. Either fix it or drop it!

This Week’s Focus!

Figure out what behaviors you want people to repeat. Now go out and find ways to give positive feedback on them! See if you can spend the next month giving weekly feedback both good and bad. At the end of the month, let’s see if we can motivate some people and fix a bad habit that someone has started.