To Scott P. Riley, building
relationships with
employees is easy:
Simply treat them the way
you want to be treated.
“If you do that, then everything seems to work out,”
says the co-owner and CEO
of Fintech, which provides
invoice payment and data
services between retailers and
alcoholic beverage suppliers.
By building those relationships, you’re also building a
loyal work force dedicated
to helping you build your
business.
Smart Business spoke
with Riley about the three
steps you can take to build
loyalty among your work
force.
Q. How do you establish
loyalty with your staff?
The first step is compensation. Our employees are
incentivized. The more customers we bring on and the
more profitable we are, the
more money everybody
makes, so they’re tied in to
the bottom line of the company, and it becomes a real
teamwork operation.
We have profit sharing, and
we match dollar-for-dollar
for our employees, which
makes them team-oriented.
It’s also the ability not to be
capped. The better our
employees get and the better
they perform, then they
know that they will be promoted from within. I always
offer the first promotion to
someone from within our
organization.
We move people up as they
mature and become stronger
in their areas — or we send
them to school — but we
always like to promote people from within to give people an incentive to stay here.
The worst way to ruin
morale is, as job openings
come up, you bring in outsiders who haven’t worked
their way up through the
ranks. If an employee performs well, and he or she has
earned the right to move up
in the organization to become
a manager and to become
compensated more, you need
to take care of that person.
What’s the incentive for
your employees to keep
doing a better job if they’re
just stuck in the same position? They’ll end up
going somewhere else.
Q. What other things
can you do to establish
loyalty?
No. 2 is the flexibility
of the employees’ work
hours. Maybe an
employee’s child gets
sick, and that person
needs to be able to
stay home and take
care of the child. Or,
they may need special
hours; I have some
people that come in at
7 and go home at 4.
It’s important to
adapt the workday to
their social life and
their family situation. If
you’re a rigid, old-school, 9-to-5 employer, you’re not
going to attract the brightest
and the best.
Our employees have certain objectives they need to
accomplish for the overall
goal; if they’ve fulfilled those
— we don’t really care when
and how — then we’re very
flexible on their hours.
