Improving worker performance - includes a bibliography

Nation's Business, Sept, 1996 by Michael Barrier

A small company that wants to survive, not to mention grow, has no choice but to seek ever-improving performance from its employees. "A small business's only advantage is that it gets more productivity, if it's smart out of the limited resources it has," says Dennis G. McCarthy, president of the Paradigm Group, a training firm in Fairfield, Conn.

Of those resources, the only one that a competitor cannot readily duplicate is a company's people. But what works to motivate employees to do their best?

Money alone usually isn't a sufficient motivator. Says Robert J. Shillman, founder and CEO of Cognex Corp., a highly successful manufacturing firm based in Natick, Mass.: "People don't really work for salary or stock options or bonuses. Sure, to get the right kind of people, you have to put together a compensation package for them, but what people really work for is appreciation and the feeling that success brings to them."

Careful hiring cannot substitute for continuing efforts to help employees perform better. "You can hire the best people, but if you don't treat them light, they're not going to be the best people anymore," says Shillman, whose company makes machine-vision devices for optical detection of defects in manufactured parts.

The small-business owner who tries to bully employees into better performance is not going to get very far, either. It's true that "you can get desired behavior through fear and punishment, but it will be very short-term," says Bob Nelson, vice president of Blanchard Training & Development, in Escondido, Calif., and author of 1,001 Ways to Reward Employees.

To help improve employee performance, a small-business owner or manager could start with questions such as these:

Do you try to make sure that there's the

right fit between employee and job?

"Just because somebody has experience in a field doesn't necessarily mean that they're suited to that field," says Terri Kabachnick, a former department-store executive who is now a personnel-issues consultant in Cromwell Conn. She cites the example of a salesman who was failing at selling high-fashion menswear, to the point that his employer had put him on probation.

"Through assessments and interviewing," she says, "we found out that he didn't have the confidence to suggest styles and colors. We moved him to an area that was his alone and that had nothing to do with fashion, or his view of himself, but had everything to do with service." That was the store's greeting-card department.

"He targeted mostly men," whom he found to be frustrated and overwhelmed by the enormous number of cards, Kabachnick says. The salesman developed a service for his customers - he took their names and all the important dates for which they would want to buy cards. Two weeks before each date, he sent his customers a selection of cards, asking them to send back any unwanted cards. Not one card was returned in that first year, Kabachnick says, and the man's card sales totaled $365,000.

Do you search for ways to put your

employees in direct contact with your

customers?

"The companies that are doing a better job of connecting at the front line, at the point of customer contact - they're the ones that are winning today and that are going to be surviving in the long term," says Jim Harris, an Indian Rocks Beach, Fla., consultant and author of Getting Employees to Fall in Love with Your Company.

Employees need to be aware of how their efforts serve customers, needs. "One of the things that allows us to keep our people is that they're not just performing a task that has been outsourced, but they're actually engaged with the client, which is a much more exciting career," says Peter C. Cowie, founder and CEO of Charter Systems, a Waltham, Mass., firm that provides computer network services.

About two-thirds of Charter's 100 employees are what Cowie calls network systems engineers." Their close involvement with customers - mostly large businesses - means that many of them get job offers, Cowie says, but "we've only lost four people we didn't want to leave the company."

Charter Systems, engineers work closely with customers in designing and supporting their computer networks, but there are many other ways to put employees in touch with customers, even when they ordinarily wouldn't see customers: by encouraging telephone contact, for example, or taking employees to trade shows.

Customer contact in itself isn't enough to guarantee improved performance, of course, as everyone who has dealt with a surly or disengaged salesperson knows all too well. "It's difficult for employees to treat customers better than they think they're being treated," Nelson says. "But if they feel they're valued, and they're excited about their jobs, it's a snap to get them to treat customers well."

Does your company's culture encourage

high performance?

There's wide agreement that the tone the owner sets for the business is critical to the success of efforts to improve employee performance. Says Harris: "I know that a lot of people say that mission statements are just fancy words on a wall; and 90 percent of the time its true. But if you really want to get at the heart of your people, you've got to give them a reason to commit. Without that, what you have is a bunch of walking dummies."