One of the most difficult things about being a business owner or manager is hiring and retaining the right people. Your staff can make the difference between profitability and bankruptcy. So how can you hire and retain for success?
Here are a few tips that might help you.
Make the hiring requirements challenging
All right, if the applicant is young, tell him he’s too young. Old, too old. Fat, too fat. If the applicant then waits for three days without food, shelter, or encouragement he may then enter and begin his training.
That might have sounded a bit over-the-top, but there is something to it. This is a simple concept you’ll find in any social psychology textbook. The more difficult it is for people to join a group, the more positively they will view that group if they are accepted into it. Think of hazing rituals done in military organizations world wide, or even in college fraternities.
To relieve their cognitive dissonance, they will rationalize that the group must be worth joining after they got burned several times while they were jumping through all flaming hoops to get accepted. Because they’ve made that rationalization in their minds, these new hires are going to be more likely to overlook any negative aspects of your organization. Or at least it will take them longer to realize that the group they joined isn’t that special and they would be better off leaving for greener pastures.
The other principle is a very common cognitive bias called the “sunk cost” fallacy. Basically, the more you invest in something, the less likely you are to divest. Being forced to go through a rigorous interview process, your new hire will feel that they’ve spent so much mental energy just to get in, that they would feel that it would be a waste if they ended up quitting.
Structure the business to keep employees motivated
Employee: The thing is, it’s not that I’m lazy, it’s that I just don’t care.
Consultant 1: Don’t… don’t care?
Employee: It’s a problem of motivation, all right? Now if I work my ass off and the company ships a few extra units, I don’t see another dime; so where’s the motivation? And here’s something else: I have eight different bosses right now.
Consultant 2: I beg your pardon?
Employee: Eight bosses.
Consultant 2: Eight?
Employee: Eight. So that means that when I make a mistake, I have eight different people coming by to tell me about it. That’s my only real motivation is not to be hassled; that, and the fear of losing my job. But you know, that will only make someone work just hard enough not to get fired.
This is a no-brainer. If your employees only want to avoid getting fired or avoid getting hassled, you’ll eventually lose them to a company that incentivizes them properly for their work. If you’re hiring sales people, the base + commission model works pretty well.
Of course, employees who aren’t in sales roles need to be incentivized as well. Even if they aren’t directly getting financial compensation, at the very least, communicate to your employees that their contributions will help the growth of the company and the eventual increases in their pay. If your employees feel like they’re just another small cog in the larger machine (especially if it is true), you’re going to lose them. You have to at least make them feel like what they’re doing matters.
The other point about structure has to do with many large organizations having seemingly too many managers overseeing the work of one person. To justify their existence (especially when it comes to highly-paid executives), a lot of micromanagement happens, which causes them to hassle the sole employee doing the actual work.
Reinforce the fear and uncertainty of leaving your company
So if you fail to structure for motivation this is a last-ditch, Machiavellian alternative. If you’re willing to go to great lengths to keep your employees from going to the competition, it might be necessary.
Admit to your employees that they’re not in a perfect company. Of course, you can still point out that they’ve got a sure thing as to where their company is going as opposed to leaving for another company. If they leave, there are no guarantees that the new job will be better. Will they really get paid better? How secure will their potentially new job be “in this economy”? What if their new boss is an ever worse a-hole than the one they have now?
This process should be done in a very implicit way. Little hints should be dropped to cast doubt at what going elsewhere would be like.
At the same time semi-random acts of kindness and generosity on behalf of the company should be done for employees.
The result is essentially the same as what happens in an abusive relationship where the abused party just can’t bring themselves to leave. The rare acts of kindness combined with the fear of the unknown is just enough for them to rationalize staying.
Inevitably, you will eventually lose employees no matter how well you treat them or how much you try to manipulate them. The modern worker has a tendency to job hop after a couple of years in any particular role. Since modern business has historically shown that their employees are expendable, employees don’t have the incentive to act loyally towards their employers.
However, at the end of the day, without your staff your business can’t function. Hiring new people, training them, only to have them leave when they finally have a productive grasp of your business is not only frustrating. It’s very costly. Unfortunately you will need to resort to some tricks to keep them.
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