Why it is Important to Look After Your Staff

Recently, with the heavy rain from Cyclone Debbie, the Queensland Premier announced that people should go home and stay indoors particularly on the Thursday afternoon when the rain was going to be at its heaviest.  With vivid memories from the 2010/2011 floods, many workers heeded this and left work to go home.  It was reported last week that the Moreton Bay Regional Council Mayor advised his staff, after the fact, that if they had gone home on the Thursday they needed to take that time as recreational leave.  As I am sure you can imagine, this has not gone down well with his staff and, generally, the wider public.

Human resource management 101 tells us that if you look after your people, they in turn will look after your business providing, generally, more productivity than they are paid for.  It is important that your staff feel valued and appreciated to maintain productivity and output for you.

In the case of the Moreton Bay Regional Council, to just put all that day’s leave to emergency leave would not be a hard stretch and the staff would feel the organisation cared about them.

You see, I believe that a business’s people are its greatest asset.  Unlike computers and machines, people can think for themselves and bring, in many instances, multifaceted input to a business, not just the skills and knowledge that the job they do requires.

Fostering a negative culture towards staff results in high turnover, work to rule and generally a very poor image for the business with customers (sorry everyone, but if your people are not happy they are happy to tell others).

Generally, it costs 1 ½ times a person’s salary to replace that person.  Downtime whilst you recruit a replacement, the time it takes to recruit, potential loss of productivity whilst someone else does the work and not their own, as well as, training and induction of the new employee into the job until they come up to speed, all contributes to the cost of turnover.

A work to rule culture also stifles productivity and output.  In this circumstance, employees are only committed to doing the hours and work they are employed to do and in many situations simply stop working when the day is over or it is smoko or lunchtime.

Also, remember your people are your marketers too.  Recruitment is a marketing tool for your business so if your people are not happy, then you gain an image of not being a very good place to work.

There are many simple and, in some instances, no to low cost ways to show your people that you value them and their contribution to your business – here are two previous blogs to help – Recognise and Reward your Staff with NO BUDGET   /    Low cost Staff Reward and Recognition Initiatives