How happy are your staff?

LET’S start off by pointing out that your staff members matter more than you know. Some schools of thought believe you should treat them exactly the way you treat customers-with maximum respect and consideration. Believe it or not, you cannot do without them. They could be everything bad and despicable but you must also take care how you treat them. They deserve love and courtesy even with the hardening of heart you develop dealing with them for a long time.
A dear friend recently found out for himself how important those “crooks”, like he calls his staff, are. He had hitherto had very little regards for them even though he religiously paid their salaries. He exacted every penalty and believed they were no good and that they needed him to survive. He was intolerant to a high level. Not anymore. He realized how wrong he had been all these while when he lost close to half his staff after one festive period. He had a good customer base but no one to serve them. He could not do most of what the “stupid boys” did with ease. He was overwhelmed and for the first time saw a collapse of the business staring him in the face. He is gradually recruiting and has sworn to be friendlier. He now knows how very important his people are.
This said, let’s point out that the very next way of abusing your staff is not taking time to know and study them. You need to do something akin to what bankers call “know your customers”. This time it is “know your staff”. The financial system is yet to recover from not taking time to know who they were dealing with. I take it they abused many of the customers by giving out amounts they couldn’t handle well. In the area of staff handling, I have had several cases in which I felt I was unfair to some individuals by not studying them well and finding out their areas of weakness.
I remember well the case of a young man I asked to be collecting sales proceeds of one team. He had a serious flaw which was the fact that he forgot who owns whatever money he is holding and starts spending it. I thought it was a queer turn of events until I realized a lot of people are like that. I believe it is this flaw that makes people buy private jets and super deluxe cars with bank funds borrowed for serious business. They simply forget who owns the money like my staff. Initially, I thought it was a one-off occurrence and held on to his salary but when it kept happening for about three months, I realized he will never change. I appointed another person to be in charge of the proceeds and he took on other tasks and he is still with me as one of the longest serving staff. I made this same mistake with another and even sent him away only for another to pick him and assign other duties that don’t involve touching money and he is the soul of the man’s business. I want him back and I have been reaching out to him knowing he is a great human when he is not handling cash.
We tend to bunch them all together and assume they will fit our moulds and by so doing force square pegs into round holes and thereby get the worst out of these people. It is a form of abuse in my view. Take out time to know your staff, they are real humans. You can save them from themselves by not exposing them to temptations they cannot resist.
Another way we can be unfair to our staff is by not caring for the total man. We talk about this and do it in big organizations but never care to do other than pay the minimum wages to our staff here. These people have birthdays, wedding anniversaries, kids a lot of other aspects of life. They also often fall sick and don’t have the means to take adequate care of themselves. A health care allowance may not be part of what you agreed to pay but is it too much to get out money and take your worker to a proper hospital when he is sick? What about a crate of drinks and some snacks to mark a worker’s birthday? What about caring deeply enough to give a salary advance to some worker whose kid is being detained in the hospital because he was unable to settle the bills? Ever thought of a special allowance to a bereaved staff, like his transport fare to and from the village for the burial?
Let’s take our minds off money briefly and talk of other ways to make our workers feel appreciated, how often do you seek their opinions? Do you keep forcing your own views down their throats forgetting they are the men on the ground out there? Unless you recruited an all fools team, you owe your staff a duty to listen to them some of the time. They are often subjected to undue abuse out there by toxic customers and you need to intervene. No matter how much you value customers, you must have to step in when your staff is not being treated well by them. It will justifiably make your workers feel less human if you believe they can be physically and verbally abused for nothing. They are as human as your dear customers.
Your staff members also have dreams and goals, especially the young ones, how do you relate to that? Do you care deeply enough to ask that young man what his plans are for the future? Are they just muscles and tools for realizing your business goals?
Lastly and this sounds odd; you must develop the ability to forgive almost all things, somewhat like what the biblical passage on love demands. There are usually a lot of offences here and without deep love mixing with your firmness; you’d be locking up people in police cells daily. Add also the ability to imagine all thing like in being able to preempt criminal conduct and you will be able to save them from big troubles.
I believe the sum of all this is that you must realize you are sealing with humans all the way.