As a business owner, what is your REASONABLE service to clients and employees?
Should you deem service to clients MORE important than your employees?
You may be surprised to learn, as we were, that serving employees systematically will in turn ensure quality service to your customers?
Don’t miss this! This is powerful!
So, it’s worth repeating, LOUDLY…
Serving employees, systematically, will ensure quality service to customers!
Now, granting that, please consider the following.
What are the top 3 employee frustrations, encountered daily in most small businesses? To be clear, we are NOT talking about employees’ personal issues from home.
From our experience interviewing employees across multiple industries, and years of business management expertise, this is what we discovered.
The top 3 LEGITIMATE employee frustrations are:
- Not understanding the owner’s complete expectation/requirement of them.
- Not having the RIGHT tools to do their job.
- Working in a CLUTTERED and DARK environment.
Certainly, we’ve identified other employee frustrations. But these are the main ones we’ve encountered throughout the years.
By identifying employee frustrations, we developed systems to not only control, but eliminate these top 3 issues. We assembled a comprehensive toolbox for cleaning up countless messes in business systematically.
We have learned that EVERY business frustration is solvable, with a system.
How Addressing Employee Frustrations Works
In our book, System Busters: How to Stop Them In Your Business, we share a story from the 1990’s concerning an employee who relished finding holes/defects in our newly discovered systemization efforts.
My oldest son, our top pressman, grew tired of hearing this employee’s gleeful discoveries; finding holes and missing prompts in our control systems.
I assured my son… “This employee is actually HELPING us. To be fair, if this employee wasn’t frustrated, he might not be acting in this insensitive manner. So, let’s help THIS EMPLOYEE,” I told my son. “No matter how many times this employee discovers and points out a defect in the system, we will FIX it.
“In truth, his attitude has NOTHING to do with us fixing OUR issues. And once we fix those holes, imagine how smooth operations will be.”
Consequently, if ANY employee found a hole or flaw in our operations, we just kept on fixing them, no matter how much time was needed.
This is continual improvement in action!
Not surprisingly, other naysayers made comments like, “We will NEVER fix all the holes in our operations.” In fact, some employees actually made a game of finding holes in our system. They no doubt assumed we would give up and return to a “loosey-goosey” work environment, where employees remain unaccountable.
YEP, without realizing it, THEY ALL HELPED US BECOME A BETTER COMPANY.
To their surprise, we continued to follow through on the road to ZERO errors and waste.
Thankfully, our efforts paid major dividends.
- Our On-time Delivery reached 99.8%.
- Total Waste Ratio dropped from over 7% of Total Sales, DOWN to 1-1/2%.
We know because we measured it!
Again, FIXING the dysfunction caused by errors and miscommunication is every business owner’s reasonable service to employees. And your employees will thank you for it.
Moreover, putting employee’s well-being FIRST works hugely to the CUSTOMER’S advantage!
Did I mention? Great systems work, work, work!
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