The old adage says an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. In business, an ounce of prevention saves a lot of headaches and lost productivity later on. Especially when it comes to employees.
It’s a concept that Dr. Jim Spahn has taken to heart and tried to live every day at EHOB Inc., a health care products provider that generated $20 million in revenue last year.
Spahn believes that daily engagement of employees, learning their ambitions, likes and dislikes, and what makes them tick, is an effective way to not only build meaningful, productive relationships with his co-workers but also stave off potential problems and conflicts at the pass.
“We show our people respect,” says Spahn, EHOB’s founder and CEO. “We listen to them, we know them, we talk to them. It’s a friendly, nonadversarial environment. We have controversies, but we don’t tolerate the inside fighting and such. It’s the culture that keeps people happy.”
Smart Business spoke with Spahn about how you can stay involved with your employees.
Listen first. The biggest thing is to take time and go listen to your employees. I’m trained as the physician, and it might be kind of the same as bedside manners. Take your time, sit down, listen to them, get to know them, but don’t just become one of them. You’ll have to make tough decisions, but take the time to tell them when things are going good. And when things are going bad, you ask for their help. It’s surprising how everybody pitches in. If a machine goes down, I’ve never had anybody tell me that they have to go home. Everybody is willing to stay around and do whatever is necessary to get stuff done.
It’s kind of like preventative medicine. If you take the time upfront, you save a lot of time at the end. So you make a point of going around, walking the floor, asking everybody how it’s going, asking them if it’s going all right. You can sit down and talk with them, as long as you don’t talk too much. Obviously, you still have to get work done. But you just act like you’re not in a hurry, talk to people and listen to them, smile when you pass them.
To wait until you have chaos on the floor or in the business to try to correct the problem is probably about 20 to 30 times more time-consuming than being preventive, talking with them upfront and catching a problem before it gets too far.
To put it more simply, it’s good time management. You can accomplish a lot if you just spend 5 percent of your time going around talking to people. That can save you a lot of grief down the road.