The Happy Employee

Julia McGovern, Susan Shelly

• Publisher: Adams Media
• Year: 2008
• eBook ISBN: 9781440515125
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Reduced workforces, hiring freezes, productivity pressures--it's clear that now, more than ever, every employee counts. With 101 practical, easy-to-implement tips, The Happy Employee will help you identify and attract the most talented employees, retain them, and make sure they're happy and productive.Real-life examples from actual situations show you how to identify the best prospects for a job and land the top candidate. Once the candidate is hired, you'll learn how to integrate your new employee into the workplace and encourage top performance.Based on research as well as years of professional experience, The Happy Employee contains tips on leadership, building trust, and earning respect. You'll learn how to develop and maintain high-performance teams through proper communication techniques and effective rewards. The Happy Employee is a practical and indispensable guide to retaining the best workers – which makes for a happy manager, as well!

Part I

HOW TO IDENTIFY AND
ATTRACT TOP TALENT

CHAPTER 1

Hiring the Right Staff Takes
Time, and Good Managers
Know Why

1 Hire Smart—And Prosper

Smart hiring is the key to successful managing, and the key to smart hiring is preparation. Smart hiring takes time, but every minute spent in preparation will yield positive and long-lasting financial and workplace results.

Poor hires take their toll on the following aspects of your business:

• The bottom line

• Workplace morale

• Productivity

Jessica, a manager responsible for hiring for a mid-sized marketing firm in San Francisco, learned the cost of a bad hire the hard way.

Hiring Too Quickly in Order to Fill a Spot

Mary’s experience in marketing was impressive, and Jessica had been excited about hiring her. Her excitement had quickly faded, however, as she realized how difficult it was to work with Mary. Mary was bright—very bright. She also was argumentative, stubborn, and resentful toward any feedback that she interpreted as being even remotely critical.

Now, with the company about to begin a huge new campaign, Mary was pulling her usual attitude, reacting badly to Jessica’s suggestions regarding the proposal she’d written, becoming incredibly defensive, and generally acting like a spoiled child. It was clear that her behavior was affecting other employees, and productivity had dropped department-wide.

While Jessica was frustrated with Mary, she also was angry with herself. She’d hired Mary quickly in order to fill a vacant position, thinking she was doing her employees a favor. She’d been wowed by Mary’s resume, by what Jessica had interpreted as a healthy dose of self-confidence, and, let’s face it, by the names of people Mary claimed to have known.

As a result, she was stuck with a difficult employee who was threatening to bring down her department. Several employees had already complained to Jessica about Mary, and Jessica had overheard other conversations that clearly indicated morale and productivity were sinking fast.

In addition, Jessica was stuck with having to explain to her boss what had gone wrong with her new hire, knowing that her mistake would cost the company thousands and thousands of dollars.

Learning from Jessica’s Mistake

Jessica made the serious, and unfortunately common, mistake of rushing to fill a position. Mary looked good on paper, and Jessica didn’t pick up on any signs of her difficult personality during the interviewing process.

In reality, however, most employee groups would prefer to have a job stay open than to acquire a teammate they don’t trust, one with poor job skills, or a person who is just difficult to get along with.

When you consider that poor hiring practices among American businesses is thought to collectively cost more than $400 billion a year through loss of productivity, turnover, and other factors, the need for smart, cautious hiring becomes even more apparent.

With time, education, and practice, managers can learn to make smart hires. While some people are naturally better at hiring than others, smart hiring is a learned skill. Managers who make it a priority to improve their search and interview skills will reap the benefits of lower turnover, reduced personnel costs, and high-performing teams. The following qualities are most associated with job success:

• A candidate’s ability to successfully perform the tasks associated with the position: Take into account prior experience, trainability, and behavioral characteristics that will enable the prospective hire to do well in a particular job.

• Attitudes that inspire a candidate to rise above the expectations of the job: Look for indications of a work ethic that will motivate the potential employee to excel.

• Compatibility with your company’s culture: Make sure that culture is clearly laid out and that the candidate understands those traits that define the company.

2 Listen to the Experts

Perhaps you are not yet convinced that smart hiring is one of the most important job lessons you can learn. After all, you’ve just started reading this book. You don’t even know if it’s going to be good. So why, after just a few pages, should you be convinced that smart hiring is not only desirable but necessary for the success of your company— not to mention the preservation of your job as a manager?

In the course of researching and writing this book, we spent a lot of time considering the advice and wisdom of top-notch managers, former managers, and business consultants. If you are not yet completely convinced that smart hiring is, indeed, an essential task, perhaps the advice and wisdom of some of these men and women will help to persuade you.

Peter F. Drucker

The late Peter Drucker, who died in 1995 at age ninety-five, has been called the world’s most influential business guru and the father of modern management. Over the course of sixty-six years he wrote more than three dozen books, which have been translated into thirty languages. His take on hiring is not only that it’s important but that it’s also difficult because it involves making decisions about people.

The toughest decisions in organizations are people decisions—hiring, promoting, firing, etc. The ability to make good decisions regarding people represents one of the last reliable sources of competitive advantage since very few organizations are good at it.

William H. Gates

Bill Gates, the cofounder and chairman of the world’s largest software company, looks for employees with not only smarts but also passion for their work. Gates is very tuned in to the Microsoft culture, and he makes it clear that employees need to fit the company culture in order to be successful there.

Hiring smart people has been the single most important thing we’ve done as a company from the very beginning. Paul Allen and I started out hiring our friends, but always with an eye to people who had a lot of passion for what they were doing and who were very, very bright. Our recruiting department works very hard to find the right people for our culture here. We also offer our employees a way to share in the company’s long-term success and we encourage people to look around the company for new challenges. When you have smart people working for you, you want to keep them stimulated and engaged.

Jack Welch

The former CEO of General Electric Corporation, Jack Welch is known as one of the greatest recruiters of all times. He was personally involved with recruiting, training, and mentoring more than 300 of GE’s top executives. Knowing how important it is to find the right person for the job, he planned for ten years for a successor to his position, from which he retired in 2001.

All we can do is bet on the people whom we pick, so my job is picking the right people.

Helen Handfield-Jones

Helen Handfield-Jones, who has worked extensively to research how companies can find and hire the best employees, coauthored The War for Talent, which was published in 2001. She advises companies around the world on how to attract, hire, and keep top players.

Having the right talent gives you a greater advantage than ever before. It’s gotten increasingly difficult to recruit, so we’ve seen companies get more aggressive.

Roger E. Herman

The late Roger Herman was the founder of the Herman Group, a firm that specializes in forecasting future trends and working with clients to best accommodate and utilize those trends. He wrote eleven books, including How to Become an Employer of Choice and Impending Crisis:

Too Many Jobs, Too Few People, and more than 1,000 articles before his death in 2006.

The presence of top-flight employees and management will attract similar applicants to the organization.

Are you convinced yet? One after another, these experts have told you that the right employees are key to making and keeping a business successful and profitable. Effective managers agree that you can’t build, or run, a great company without capable, engaged employees. Whether you’re managing a restaurant, a bank, or a software manufacturing company, your employees can be your greatest asset—or your worst nightmare.

It’s vitally important to act deliberately, make good decisions, and use sound judgment when recruiting and hiring employees. Just ask the experts.

3 Consider the Best-Fit Factor

A software company named a team of eight employees to work on a special project. The project was to be completed in four months, and the team members would be expected to work as many hours as required to complete it within that time frame.

All eight employees were enthusiastic about their mission, even though they knew it would require many extra hours. They were committed to the project and to Jack, the manager who had assigned them to it.

Work was progressing ahead of schedule, and team members had established a productive and enjoyable working rapport when, four weeks into the project, disaster struck. One of the employees, Roger, lost control of his car while traveling along a dark, curvy road and was critically injured. His injuries were severe and would require several surgeries and months of recuperation and rehabilitation.

The other team members were devastated, as was Jack. It was not feasible to move another employee onto the team at that time, so Jack decided to bring in someone new to fill Roger’s spot.

Looking to keep the team—and the project—on track, Jack put out feelers looking for a good, and available, candidate to take Roger’s place.

A friend from another company recommended that Jack consider Sarah, who was looking to get back to work after having left her former job to stay at home with her baby. Sarah, as Jack’s friend reported, was extremely bright and articulate, as well as being a tireless worker.

What the friend didn’t report, though, was that Sarah’s coworkers at her previous job had breathed a big sigh of relief when she left and hoped she would never come back. Let’s just say that Sarah had a bit of a problem getting along with other people.

Jack called in Sarah for an interview and was impressed with her composure and her energy. Obviously well prepared for the interview, Sarah wowed Jack with her answers to his questions. She was absolutely charming and, as a graduate of an Ivy League university with a record of volunteerism and civic participation as long as her arm, had an impressive resume, to say the least.

Thinking he’d found the perfect candidate, Jack hired Sarah. A week later, he introduced her to the other seven team members.

While Sarah may have appeared to be a dream candidate, it very soon became clear that she was anything but. It would have been difficult for anyone to come in and take over for Roger, who had a spe...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Part I: HOW TO IDENTIFY AND ATTRACT TOP TALENT
• Part II: RETAINING YOUR BEST AND BRIGHTEST EMPLOYEES
• Part III: MAINTAINING MORALE TO KEEP EMPLOYEES HAPPY AND PRODUCTIVE