The Newsletter dedicated to Managers and Business Owners

Recognition can get you more for less

You don’t have to watch the news to know unemployment is on the rise to an all-time high. A down economy means that your store, at some point soon, will be forced to do more with less.

But how is this going to work when we are already overworking ourselves?

This answer is fairly simple…engage the best members of your staff at a level they have never seen before, allowing your store to produce double the effort with less people.

In tough times stores tend to put engaging and rewarding on the back burner. They never consider the damages they are inflicting by playing it safe. Engaged employees dramatically improve any company’s performance. On the flip side, disengaged employees do much more damage than just the work they don’t do.

Disengaged employees can actually be like a poison running through your store. They require more of your energy to keep them motivated to work and they drain your good staff members by complaining and spreading pessimism.

As managers, we have a tendency to encourage and reward people that we feel need the extra push. Why aren’t we rewarding and encouraging the people we don’t have to encourage all of the time? What about those great employees that can motivate themselves and that consistently outperform their colleagues?

Let’s admit to ourselves that we have the following categories of employees:

Stars – people that perform day after day, at full potential, and that don’t need a daily pep talk.

Roller coasters – people that you never know how they’re going to perform day-to-day. Some days they’re genius, other days they’re “Dilbert”. You have to motivate them every other day because you know they “have it in them”.

Polly paycheck – people that are clearly only there for a paycheck. They do the bare minimum and throw a fit if asked to go the extra mile for anything.

Oxygen stealers – people that could care less about anything. Yeah, they want a paycheck, but they wouldn’t be heartbroken if they didn’t have a job with you. They just want to go home and play video games.

Okay, so this may seem a little silly, but is it?

Imagine having a store full of stars. Imagine a world where you have piece of mind and you don’t have to use your energy motivating the same people over and over again. You can focus only on making your store, and the customer’s experience, better and better.

At this point you may be saying to yourself, “yeah that sounds great and all, but I can’t afford to have only stars”.

My reply to that goes something like this.

Every manager has turnover already built into their business plan. Start now and get rid of the oxygen stealers and the Polly paychecks. They do more harm than good.

As far as stars go, there are stars everywhere, you just have to be on the lookout. Good people are looking for more than just money. The number one thing people look for in their jobs is a sense of contribution.

People just want to work for a person that will listen to them and that will let them contribute their ideas. Also, they want to be rewarded for their contributions with a token of your appreciation.

The more stars that you bring into your store, the more “non-stars” will be headed out. It just requires a recruiting effort on your part.

Focus on the stars you already have and engage them to get involved. Ask them how they operate if they were in your shoes. Ask them what they would do to make the customer experience better.

The final step of this whole process is to use your recognition program to its fullest potential. This will require you to fully endorse and support the effort, making it an integral part of the store’s culture and tying it directly to the store’s goals and values.

When the program is truly embedded into the day-to-day workings of a company, recognition can literally turn a company inside out, for the better.

Establish clear objectives and ways to measure performance, and then reward that performance as it contributes to the company goals and mission. With a greater insight into how employees regard recognition and the company values, a manager can then manipulate the social structure of their store to better achieve goals and cultivate an atmosphere of stars.

Til next time,

Josh Long