Hiring in a Tight Market / Performance Evaluation / Employee Attitude Surveys, CompDoctor February 1999

Question: We are a small manufacturing company that is running two production shifts. We are having extreme difficulty in hiring and keeping employees on the second shift. Although we are paying above the market for similar companies, are turnover is excessive and we are having trouble meeting our customers needs. Is there anything we can do to keep people on the second shift? M. S.

CompDoctor: Dear M. S. I trust that your initials are not an acronym for multiple shifts or manufacturing snafu. With unemployment near an all time low in the Twin Cities, in fact we are in the top twenty-five major cities with the lowest unemployment in the nation. So, this is to say that you and everyone else are tying to get and keep the same bodies. No wonder people are stressed out.they are working for two employers. With vacation and sick time, they are having trouble leading two lives. One day here, one day there, pretty soon they decide that one employer is better than two. So much for mints!

As far as recruiting, you need to pull out all stops. Hire a recruiter that pays attention to your issues. Get them to spend a day every two weeks at your plant, screening resumes and interviewing candidates. If you find someone who can walk and chew gum at the same time, hire him or her, on the spot. And as a bonus, give them a couple hundred dollars the day they show up for work. Also, give current employees the same couple of hundred dollars if they refer a candidate that is eventually hired. Seek out minority groups for candidates, the job service and advertise on every means available. This includes major newspapers, local newspapers, the Internet, and seeks out companies that are downsizing.

Once you get them on board, you appear to be paying them a competitive salary. Good for you. But here is something you can do to keep them there. First, if they stick around for 30 days, increase their pay by thirty cents and hour. If they are still there after 90 days, do it again. Then, when they get to 6 months, throw more cash at them. Then, randomly every month, drop a dinner gift certificate on them so they can take the family out to eat.

While this may sound expensive, think about this. For every person that leaves, you will end up spending another $1,500 to $2,500 just to find, recruit and train new employee. So, in the end, you need to figure out what you might get if you actually pay your current employee that extra money. Since you are going to spend it any way, wouldn't it be better to spend it on someone who is in house rather than someone who is hasn't applied yet.

Don't forget that pay may not be the only reason people are leaving. Make sure that your supervisors are good, and know how to make work fun, involve their employee and treat their workers as people rather than pieces of meat. Send them to supervisor school and monitor their supervision. Many people leave not because of pay, but because the work environment (hint, hint; how they are treated) is a disaster. Spend some time in the plant yourself. Noting inspires are worker than the top dog actually taking time out to talk to their workers. Just a simple mater of respect and decency.

You might also need to conduct exit interviews to see why they are leaving. You may find out that they just don't like working in your plant. Use the information to change the culture. While this is harder than throwing money at them, it will pay off in the long run and be a lot cheaper.

Question: We are thinking of developing a performance evaluation system. But I have talked to my fellow business owners who have them and they think they don't work. How can we hold our people accountable if these systems don't work? G. K.

CompDoctor: I like you better than Suzie. You get a big raise and Suzie gets squat. Welcome to the world of subjectivity. Performance evaluations have mixed reviews. On the plus side, they help to focus employee's attention on what they should be spending their time on. They also improve communications between supervisors and employees. On the negative side, they are subjective. Nobody likes doing them, neither the supervisor nor the employee. Employees complain that if their boss doesn't like them, they will get a bad performance review. But bosses say they want to reward their top employees. Problem is nobody can agree on what a top employee looks like. (Oh, well maybe 6'2", dark complexion, impeccably dressed!) It's like I know one when I see one, but don't ask me to tell you what they look like until they are in front of my face.

I could go on and on about how to design a good system, but in the end, they will still be subjective and you can't get away from the employee issue of favorites. Here are couple of hints. Whatever you do, make it simple. One sheet of paper ought to do it. At the beginning of the year, meet with your employee and draw up a contract. The contract says this. "If you do X, I will give you Y" "X" is anything that you think the employee should be doing that is related to improving the performance of the business and that the employee has control over. Keep the number of 'X's" to 5 or less.

Midyear, meet with the employee again and review the list. See if anything has changed that make the X's impossible to achieve or already completed. Don't water them down, but be realistic. Maybe some new problem emerged that makes it all but impossible to achieve X. Make some accommodations for that. But, if the X's were important at the beginning of the year, they should still be valid.

Above all, try to set X's that are objective; those things that are observable, verifiable, and explainable. They should be so obvious that even the employee's co-workers would agree with you. Then, at the end of the year, hold up your end of the bargain. Give them the raise you agreed to. If you don't, kiss the process good bye. You will have just undermined any faith and trust that your employee had in you.

Finally, keep away from such impossibly immeasurable criteria such as leadership, written and oral communications or problem solving ability. You can't measure them, nobody agrees what they are, and above all, they have little impact on your bottom line. Relate everything to observable behavior.

At the end of the year, if you have done well, you can sing the lyrics to this one: Everybody loves me, yes they do.

Question: We are considering an employee attitude survey to find out what our employees are thinking. We have never done this before and wonder what we might be getting ourselves into.
What advice would you give us? P. K.

CompDoctor: P. K., are you ready for some football? A little flea flicker, or quarterback sneak? Look out but the "Fridge" is coming your way. Be ready for some action. Cause once you ask the question, you had better be ready for the consequences. You see, employees have this funny little quirk about them. That is, if you ask me what I think is wrong around here and my fellow employees feel the same, we want some action. None of this punting on third down stuff. You had better be ready to go for the two points.

Here is some advice. Make sure that a reliable survey specialist develops your questionniare. Because the way you ask the question can give you either the results you want, or nothing that you ever dreamed of. Make it short. It is better to give several questionnaires on slightly different, and highly focused issues than to give one massive questionnaire the covers everything. Most people's tendency is to ask all sorts of questions. Employees can't concentrate for much longer than 20 minutes on these things. A good test is that if you ask a question, know that you will do with the answers.

When you give the employees the questionnaire, make sure you make it confidential. It is best to have an outside consultant do this for you because employees are very suspicious of these. They think that even if you don't ask for names, you can somehow decode how they check the boxes, or the pencil lead or color of ink or measure their skin residue and find out who really answered each questionnaire. No retaliation here, now.

Also, if you have an outside firm do the survey, they can collect the questionnaires and process the data. Better yet, they will have some normative data so that you can compare yourself to other companies like yours.

When the results are back, immediately share them with the employees. Hold nothing back. Give them the good, the bad and the ugly. And there will be some of all of these things. Identify the issues that you will work on, and ones that you will not and why. It is no embarrassment to admit that you will not work on their suggestions, as long as you do make progress on some. You must have a good reason for not implementing others.

When all is finished and things are back on track, do it all over again. Because once you ask them their opinions, they will actually think that you want to know. There is an old saying that applies to this situation. Once you teach the bear to dance, you'd better be ready to dance until the bear gets tired!

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