Make employees feel valued
You hire employees to do a job and fill a role in making your organization work. In order for them to buy in to your leadership and give their all toward their work, you need to show them that you value their efforts through positive reinforcement.
“My experience is that 75 percent of all people need positive reinforcement every 90 days,” Perlman says. “Without that, their world crumbles.”
He likens it to being a parent who is trying to encourage a child.
“If you tell them to do their homework in September and you don’t come back again until November or December, you think they did their homework all the way through?” Perlman says. “Probably not.”
The lesson is that you need to constantly provide this reinforcement, whether it’s an e-mail, a pat on the back or a commendation at a company meeting. One of the best times to do it can be when business is a little slower.
“When business is very fast, you don’t have the time to work on those things,” Perlman says. “We’re doing something called the ‘wow factor’ now, which is where we want the store upper management to do something that is above and beyond for the customer every day. It could be anything. From the head store manager carrying a package out to a customer’s car in the rain to almost anything. We use e-mail and send them around talking about these wow factors. Then they compete with who has the best wow factor this week. When the store manager does it, the guy underneath him does it and that’s how that works.”
But showing value is more than just saying, “Good job.” It’s following through on commitments that they agreed to follow when you hired them.
Perlman recalled a young employee who had worked hard to earn a promotion and done everything he had to do to make it happen. The only thing left was Perlman’s authorization to make it official.
“He already had all the documentation on file,” Perlman says. “I was unable to do it the first day it came in. I went to do it the next day. He called me the next morning and said, ‘Why haven’t I been approved yet?’”
Perlman promptly took care of the authorization and the promotion went through. The lesson learned was just as he might need to give a little boost to employees to get things done, sometimes he needed a boost, too.
It’s the idea that everybody operates under the same set of rules that provides a level of comfort for employees to know what to expect.
“If you have a name-tag rule that everybody has to wear a name tag, certainly the top executive better be wearing a name tag,” Perlman says. “It can be simple things like where employees can park. We have a health care plan and the same plan for an hourly warehouse guy is the sam
e plan that I’m on. There’s no unfair deals. I may get paid more than that person, but I don’t have a different 401(k) plan. I don’t have a different medical plan. If it’s good enough for you, it should be good enough for your people.”
Reinforce the fact that while some employees may work in different departments, you do all work for the same company. Getting to know their names is a good place to start.
“There was a time when I knew everybody in the company,” Perlman says. “I haven’t been there in years. But there’s a familiarity that you can develop with your people that’s important. Know as many people by first name as you can.”
