Managing employees in the small business

Search SMBresource

Managing people in the SMB.

Management at a small and medium sized business is not the same as managing people in a large company . Bigger companies always pay lip-service to the importance of the employees, but it's usually just that, lip-service. The SMB's simply don't have the luxury of managing with an employee manual. For the low level non-skilled and non-technical workers, yes, you can manage them pretty easily because they are easy to replace. For the highly motivated, highly intelligent people we're seeking to grow the business, that just isn't the case.

Who are these people?
If we’re going to undertake some changes—aimed at increasing the productivity and retention of the cream of the crop—the first step is to define the types of employees we’re targeting. Usually this is pretty easy. For the entrepreneur it’s always easy. He knows his business inside and out and he knows who’s bringing home the bacon for him.

Even in a slow economy, tens of thousands of high tech jobs go unfulfilled. The market for these people has always been tight and will remain that way for the foreseeable future. If you manage a group of highly skilled people, no doubt you’ve been in the position of losing one of them to a competitive offer. The best way to prevent the high-tech, high skilled, turnover problem, is to give them incentives so they don’t go looking in the first place. But what about the not so high-tech people? We can always find someone to work the customer service counter or answer the phones right? You sure can. But even within this group of, let’s be honest, relatively low skilled employee, there are HIHMs. One personal example I can give you is a small computer parts distributor where many of the computer companies in Cincinnati buy supplies. The girl that works at the front counter has been there forever. She drives a nice car, and I assume probably makes pretty good money for what she does. Guess why? The place is privately owned and the owner knows this girl is always busting her rear end. She’s friendly, but not overly talkative. She works very fast but doesn’t make mistakes. If something is wrong she tries to fix it. Quite a few people (me among them) buy parts from this company because we know this girl is going to work her hardest to make sure everything goes well. It’s one less headache I have to worry about. In short, she is the consummate HIHM. In most, if not every single big company in the United States, she would be just another employee. And if you’re the VP of everything important at Fortune 5000 company X, my guess is you’re saying “Oh not at our company, we know how to treat our good people!” I say this. “Bull!”. In every big company I’ve worked in, either as an employee, or contractor, or consultant, the corporate culture just doesn’t allow for the singling out of people and putting them on a pedestal.

With the difficulty of simply finding these people, keeping them for the long term becomes much more important. This is the essence of small business management. When you come across a technically talented, highly intelligent, and highly motivated person, keeping them becomes downright mission-critical. These men and women are the cream of the crop. They know it. They expect much of themselves, and they expect much of you.

To what sort of individual do we need to pay special attention, so that they stay happy and productive? It isn’t always crystal clear just who they are.
Who do we need to make happy or, at least, content? The short answer is, of course, that we want everyone to be happy and productive. Happy employees tend to be more productive. The problem is that a couple of people are critical to our success and are exceedingly difficult to replace. If we keep these people, a manager’s job becomes a little easier. When hours are spent every week mining Monster.com and Dice.com to replace people, the focus is not on growing the company. Valuable time is lost that should have been spent retaining the people you do have.
If you can keep your top people around for a long time, it’s no longer such a big drain on the bottom-line when a couple of average workers walk out the door. When we’ve retained our top people, recovery times are quicker, and replacement is easier. For a short time, they can absorb the load while they help to train the replacement. Generally, of course, even the substandard employee has value to the company and costs more money to replace (at least initially) than it would cost to keep the person around. However, when the average worker or substandard worker decides to move on, we generally don’t shed many tears.

When an organization loses one or two of its key people, the department is thrown into chaos for a few weeks, at best … forever, at worst. Losing an HIHM is a clear indicator of how shallow many organizational management approaches really are. When we group the highly motivated with the rest of the crew, we marginalize his/her true impact. Logic further dictates that if we treat a stellar female performer like she’s just one of the guys, she’ll either eventually begin to perform like one of the guys, or move on to another company where her efforts are more appreciated.
Any work environment that takes a great deal of mental effort is going to be filled with people smarter than the average bear. The kind of person we’re going to focus most of our attention on, goes a step above that in one way or the other. The person might be very intelligent, exceedingly hard working, or have an absolute mastery of the job at hand due to years of experience. Anohter HIHM might be the one who consistently completes the jobs no one else wants.

The bottom line is this: Small business management is just as much about not causing problems, as it is creating opportunities. Keeping your best people content and productive takes a huge burden off of your management plate.

Copywrite 2005 Must credit SMBResource.com

An entrepreneurial approach to management