Set Your Employees Free
Categories: Entrepreneur, Lead Management, Prospecting, Sales Strategy
Written By: SOCOM Sales
This is an interesting article I read from Entrepreneur.com and my thoughts on it.
Looking for a new way to increase employee satisfaction and loyalty? It may not be as hard as you think. A new survey by Kenexa Research Institute, a recruitment and retention consulting firm, discovered that telecommuters report the highest level of job satisfaction. According to the survey, which took place in June, about 73 percent of remote and home-based workers said they’re satisfied with the company they work for, as opposed to 64 percent of office workers. Jack Wiley, executive director of the Kenexa Research Institute, said allowing employees to work remotely is a matter of respect. “I respect you and I have confidence in your commitment to the work, to do this under the conditions and at the time you feel will be most productive for you,” said Wiley.
But telecommuting isn’t catching on at all workplaces. Some businesses worry about how to administer a work-at-home policy in a fair way for all employees. And some employers still have what Wiley called a “command-and-control mentality,” meaning if they can’t actually watch employees, they don’t know how productive they’re being.
Companies should inherently trust their employees. Sure there should be a probation like period with newbies, but why did you hire them in the first place if you didn’t think they could do the work? If you have the IT infrastructure to allow people to work from home, why not let them do it?
Giving an employee the flexibility to work from a home office is better than most financial compensation. Good employees will do their jobs and many times be more productive since they do not have to worry about commutes or have the daily office distractions that are always available.
It should be emphasized that their is a standard, which is something I have found in companies not to exist to much of an extent. It’s hard for new employees to know what the standard is out the gate. It’s one of those things that is ‘learned over time’. If new employees were told specifically what was going to be expected of them and the metrics that were put in place, I don’t think that most would fall short. It becomes a problem when there are no standards set.
It’s no wonder that telecommuters have a higher job satisfaction rating than office based employees. how great is it to wake up in the morning start the day off with a home brewed cup of coffee start a load of wash and walk into the next room and start getting things done? There really is nothing that compares.
I am very familiar with the ‘command and control’ mentality. Being from the military myself, command and control is #1 in a leaders mind when it comes to success of a mission. But C2 as it is now called in the military has taken on new forms and so should the parallel with business. Technology has made many leaps in this arena, and a sales manager on the other side of the world can check through a CRM system like SalesForce or NetSuite to see what his staff is doing. The idea that your employees need to be cube animals is so far gone since simple applications like a CRM and email can give you the control you need and let your employees feel empowered to run their lives and still be highly effective at their jobs.
As we move from Generation X to Generation Y in the workforce, managers need to understand the shifts they need to make to get these new employees as well as keep the ones they have.
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