Q. How do you handle a mistake from an employee?
You’ve got to say, did they take a calculated risk? Based on the information they made, was it a logical decision? If it was a logical decision based on the information that they had, you’ve got to reward them for it. Doesn’t mean you’ve got to give them a $100,000 bonus. But, you can’t make a scapegoat out of them. You’ve got to celebrate the fact that they tried. In baseball, if you bat .300, which means you get a hit three in 10 times, you get a couple million dollars a year, maybe $10 million a year. Business is not that different. It’s not every time you get up to bat you’re going to get a hit. Why do they call it ‘cold calling’ where you get 100 calls and you get one sale?
So, you’ve got to realize you’re going to have a success, and if you bat .300, it’s pretty good at your new ideas and your new things. So, you’ve got to really reinforce that it’s OK to try things and it’s OK to make mistakes.
Q. How has empowering employees to make mistakes benefited the company?
A direct way when you look at our referrals, so an existing customers says, ‘Use SurePayroll.’ We get about 20, 25 percent of our clients from existing customers who refer business. That’s the lowest cost acquisition channel I have. You could actually put that into real dollars and that is real benefit. Some of that comes from the fact that we are continuing to try new things and some of it comes from that fact that we are empowering our employees to do the right thing.
To give you some sort of specific examples of these kinds of moments of truth, some of the things we are doing to try something new, if you will, we have some new functionality in our product called the one-click payroll, allowing people to do payroll in one click. That came out of empowering our employees to say, ‘Hey, what are we hearing on the phones, what do people want, what do people need?
How to reach: SurePayroll Inc. (877) 954-7873 or www.surepayroll.com
