Employees and HR issues

• Getting new employees into your selling culture is the first step. The next step is to keep them long enough to start increasing responsibility. The beginning stages of a recruit’s career with you are significant. There are thresholds that people hit that you may be aware of or not as you see people get settled into your culture. There are several important thresholds that come up early on, particularly at two weeks, two months and six months when your employees are reevaluating their decision to stay. They ask themselves, “Did I make the right choice by coming on board here? Is this something I want to do? Am I doing the things I like? Am I getting what I need here” These are times when you need to spend a few minutes with them, check in with them see what’s happening in their minds. The very fact that you are checking in will give them an opportunity to voice concerns. Keep the new people challenged, because the worst thing you can do is let a talented and motivated person get bored. That’s bad for two reasons. They will stop enjoying the newness of the position and they will feel awkwardly underutilized. Look at some of your current successes. Even if you have not been trying to build selling culture, you have had successes in your business. Who’s really doing well for you and why? Some of you may have no idea why some of your best people are some of your best people. Try and figure that out. It may be you just got lucky and hired somebody with a great personality who is eager to learn and likes a challenge. Or maybe you did something, intentionally or unintentionally, to help develop them. So find out what it is you did to make these people be successful, and try and do that with the next group of people. You should start thinking today who your next good hire is going to be. I run into some good retail people from time to time, and I take a note where they work and who they are and what their name is in case I have an opening and I need to go find them again. Not every position will be appropriate for the people you run into. But when you have a position that could be a good match, your recruiting efforts could be vastly simplified. I have been asked before: if you find a great potential employee, do you make room in the organization for them? I’d say you have to answer that question in a couple of ways for yourself. This depends a lot on your management style. If you like to manage a week or two ahead of the wave or a week or two behind the wave, that’s going to determine somewhat whether you bring the new person on board before you really need him or her, or after you have an opening. If you have a weak player that you need to replace, I would say to bring the new person on as a temporary. Give them some temporary assignments to make sure they’re working out, and then allow the weaker person on the team to go find new employment. That way you could be sure you have a strong replacement before you let the weak employee go. That could be an effective way to handle it. But if everybody on your team is doing well and you’ve found someone who you think is outstanding, and if you make room for that person, you’ve now increased your payroll costs. Can you justify it? That has to be your question. Are you going to get enough value back in what that person’s doing to justify the increase in your expenses? You may gain more benefits than you anticipated by bringing on a good new person. He or she may find many ways to bring value to your selling culture that you could not have planned. You have to ask yourself if the potential gain is worth the additional payroll. One of the challenges we have in self storage, as you know, is that the business can be somewhat seasonal. So there are times that we’re hiring people, and there are times we’re letting people go. Can you keep a good potential recruit waiting while you wait out the ebb and flow? There certainly are challenges involved in hiring good people, because it is true that good help is hard to find. It’s just not just a myth; it is true. And it is true that what we offer people is not for everyone, and you just have to realize that. Sometimes you have to let nice people go because the position you are trying to fit them into is just not for them. You might feel bad about letting the person go. But it’s nicer and smarter for you to let them go if the job is not for them than to keep them on and torture them, or to keep them on and let your revenues suffer or let your customers suffer. There is an interesting fact about wages. The money is not as important as you think: I hear a lot of people at trade shows talk to each other and say, “What do you pay your manager?” “What do you pay your manager?”, “What do you pay a manager?” I realize you have to pay people something. They have to make enough in their mind to make it worth getting up each day to go to work. They have to feel as if they are getting fair market value for the time, effort and energy they put into growing your business. But do you know what? A dollar or two an hour doesn’t make a bit of difference to someone if they’re bored, if they’re not challenged, or if they don’t like what they’re doing. So remember that the main thing for people is to be able to feel valued and to feel as if they bring value. If people like what they’re doing and like how you deal with them and like the challenge involved in their job, a dollar or two an hour is not going to make a difference to them. So don’t be so hung up on exactly what your wages are; be more hung up on how interested and engaged your employees are and how much they enjoy their interaction with you and how well they take direction from you and how well they give feedback to you. Those are much better indicators than most anything to tell you how your selling culture is building and how it’s coming together. Brought to you by: Self Storage Owner Looking for Storage? 37067 Self Storage Please also visit our partners Self Storage Locations and their Self Storage Article Directory

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Disclamer: This entry is intended to promote our partner StorageMart and some or all participants received compensation.

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