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How to get and keep great staff (1)

Written by: Roland Hanekroot

Article Overview: What if I told you that people don’t work for money!

How to get and keep great staff (1)

Research all over the world carried out across many different industry sectors, ages, genders, races and cultures consistently indicates that people are primarily not motivated by how much they get paid.


The most important factors that determine how happy an employee is in her job and how effective and productive she is in it are:

Does she feel she has the opportunity to do what she does best, every day?

Does she feel she is given plenty of opportunity to get even better in her areas of strength?

Does she know what is expected of her at work, every day?

Does her immediate supervisor have regular, structured, meaningful interaction with her that incorporates constructive feedback and acknowledgement?

Other research into management styles and developments in the field of “positive psychology” indicate that people develop certain distinct, innate talents, early in life. These talents become strengths as they grow older and more experienced. Other areas don’t develop as talents and because of that they don’t ever become strengths. No matter how much training and practicing you do in those areas, the best you can ever hope for is that you learn some skills, and learn to “get by”.


Small business owners
Taken together, these are powerful insights for us small business owners. All of us are good at some things, and not so good at others, and worse, we actually hate doing those things. So we employ staff to do those things for us. But how do we find staff that have talent and strength in our own “non-talent” areas, and how do we get them to really excel and stick around for the long haul.

To have a workplace where staff love to work and perform at excellence all the time you need to start at the beginning:

What comes naturally to you, what are your strengths, your talents? Be as specific as you can be. Write it down.

What do you always struggle with? Specific and detailed. Write it down.

Now put all the jobs that are part of your role in two columns, called talent (strengths) and non-talent (non-strengths).

Detail the talents and strengths you need for the jobs in your non-talent column. Again, get as specific as possible, don’t be tempted with HR jargon; “People skills” for example is not a useful descriptor.

Now find someone strong in those talents specifically. (someone who already works for you or when hiring a new employee) Look for indicators of their strengths, not their experience. Passion for something is a good indicator for example, as is willingness to learn. If someone has a talent for something they will learn very quickly. Hire for talent.

Give them the role, and make sure they can use their strengths as much as possible.

Spend time with them to help them develop those strengths further and further.

Don’t waste time training them up in areas of their “non-talents” it will make them feel unmotivated and you frustrated. (obviously there is some room for flexibility in this rule)

Delegating
In a following article I will talk further about how to make sure that you can get on with your own work confident that your staff are doing theirs, and how to give regular meaningful feedback to your employees.

These are some of the secrets that ensure that an employee will answer with a strong Yes to the 4 questions above. When she does, she will love coming to work and getting stuck into it……and so will you!

This article is based on my own experiences and insights as well as on the following books amongst others:

- “First break all the rules” and “Now discover your strengths” The Gallup Organisation and Marcus Buckingham

- “The one minute Manager” series by Ken Blanchard

- “Learned Optimism” Prof Martin Seligman

Related Articles
  Staff Management – the Effective Way to Get Things Done by Other People.
  Entrepreneurs – Do You Have Problems Keeping Staff?
  The Managers Most Useful Tool
  Here Is A Method That Is Helping New Managers To Delight Their Staff
  Turning Your Employees into Salespeople

Article Tags: acknowledgement, constructive feedback, cultures, genders, important factors, industry sectors, innate talents, insights, job, jobs, long haul, love, management styles, meaningful interaction, positive psychology, small business owners, supervisor, talent areas



Related Forum Posts
Re: [JOINT VENTURE] Want FREE Staff? Want to Scale Up Massively? - Hi JV, Really interesting offer. However I have 2 questions. 1) Credentials? Any website? Any client list? 2) Where do you get your staff from? How? I mean if i really am going to hand over a lot of sensitive information to be handled by staff of your choosing, I'll need to know how you operate with total transparency.
Re: Internet Fax Services - any suggestions? - Our office uses an efax service here in Australia however, i think they are in Australia but service worldwide utbox.net service is great, we manage multiple engineer sign off forms on a daily basis and to avoid to cost of paying staff to scan in documents, this does it for us, we can save to server and email to clients on demand. The other benefit to it is, if the fax does not come through completed correctly or it fails, we are not wasting paper, ink/toner etc, the cost of the efax services now far outweighs the cost of admin staff and consumables. Steven Hayes SEMRAY Pty Ltd
Re: Should you hire ambitious workers or employees with no goals - [quote="TheRainmaker":yeumhkgq]Wow - I dont think I have ever referred to my staff as grunts. that is horrible. I personally hire great attitudes. ambitious to do good work, grow and fulfill their inner goals. if you go the other way, you have to do much more hand holding and they will never go the extra mile for you or your business...[/quote:yeumhkgq] Well I don't think any boss would ever call their employees "grunts" (unless it was a joke), but like it or not, that's what they (or we) are. In a sense, even an entrepreneur is a "grunt", cog or moving part in his/her own corporation. No one lives forever and not even the founder/owner of a small business is irreplaceable. As proof of this, a business can exist for as long as it's profitable with the right staff.
Famous Entrepreneur Profiles - Hi Andy, I have great staff who handles the research and writing of the famous entrepreneur profiles. That's how we're able to launch a new one each week! Keep the suggestions coming!
Walmart ie ASDA uk - Hi there, Quite often I ask the staff, if they like to work at ASDA? Are you happy. So far I always had a good response. I do my regular shopping there. On my next visit I will ask a cross section of people about their working relationship with their employer. I don't know, what percentage of senior staff is from Walmart, USA. I believe it is important to have an excellent working relationship with your employer. Sometimes management has a lot to answer for. Kindest Regards Beat "Unlock People's Potentials!"


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