Address employee needs
Employees won’t follow leadership that they don’t feel can lead them effectively and, therefore, they can’t trust. As a CEO who oversees nearly 1,600 employees in Miami-Dade County alone, Rodriguez is unable to meet with every employee and build this trust through personal and daily interactions. However, there are other ways to reinforce trust through the way you manage your business and the way to handle the areas that affect employees most directly.
One is payroll. To earn employee trust, Rodriguez says you have to pay on time and you have to pay correctly — no exceptions. When it comes to payroll, just one bad experience can tarnish employees’ trust in its leadership. Therefore, you also have to have accountability in payroll to make sure the systems are always working and employee concerns about payment are addressed immediately and effectively.
“Whenever somebody has their doubts on their monthly check or weekly check, whenever they have to sit down with a supervisor in order to review overtime, that it has been correctly paid or the number of hours they have worked or the health care benefits that they have and so on, … you have to have people that are capable of explaining those things to the employees,” Rodriguez says. “That has definitely been the reinforcement that we have done.”
In addition to monitoring efficiency in payroll, Rodriguez works continuously to find ways to improve employee benefits. If you want to keep your top talent from moving to competitors, giving them lower costs on insurance compared to other companies in the industry is often more valuable than giving them pay raises.
“It’s a matter of motivation through incentives, and not so much in salary but in benefits,” Rodriguez says. “That is what is going to improve fidelity of them remaining with us.”
Offering competitive benefits and paying employees on time shows them that your company invests in their success and hard work. Responding quickly to employee concerns in areas such as payroll is an important part of keeping a business efficient. Additionally, it’s how you show employees that they can trust leadership to fulfill their needs.
Rodriguez makes sure that that he and his direct reports have effective ways to respond quickly to any employee issue, whether it concerns a client relationship, a missing uniform or an error in payroll. In a company with 35,000 employees, mistakes will happen and problems will arise, but implementing the fastest response possible shows employees you support them and recognize their individual problems as the company’s problems.
“Trying to have a quick response to them is the key to have them happy with us and working with us and feeling the spark of a team,” Rodriguez says. “At the end of the day, the ones that are representing you as a company are your employees because they are in the houses of our clients. Obviously, if they are going to have problems, they are going to transmit those to our clients. The best recipe is to be aware of all the things going on with your employees. That is the main way of fixing the problems.”
Whether you are managing 35 people or 35,000, you can’t handle the situations and issues being faced by all your employees at any given moment. It’s not realistic. However, when there is an opportunity to help an employee deal with a problem, as CEO, being the first to step up and take control of the situation shows people who work for you that you are still personally driven to make your company successful.
“Whenever someone has trouble doing a spreadsheet or typing a letter or going to the airport and having to manage the baggage and the belt loader, I’m going to do it as the first one in the company,” Rodriguez says.
“Your team has to believe, has to have the impression, that you are the one who is the first one to pull up your pants and get into the mud and to help anyone with a contract. That’s what I have always been doing and I’m going to continue to do that.”
As a leader, demonstrating to employees that you are willing to put in the hard work to help them be successful also shows them that you don’t just see them as people you manage but as colleagues in your business.
“As long as you have the people really joining you and feeling themselves as part of a team, they are going to communicate that to other people and potential clients,” Rodriquez says.
