I’ve been in business 20+ years - starting alone for the first years. Built it up and now have 5 employees. Recently I have been talking to my employees about buying into the company as I am nearing retirement. I gave two of my employees raises one of them a percentage based on his production. after that I got total silence never a thank you or anything so that caused some concern right there. One of the employees was receiving over $1000 a month raise. Recently I got Covid-19’s bad and was out for 2 months. I I have cameras at work so me and my partner were reviewing the cameras and noticed they were talking a lot of shit about me and making plans to start their own business I’m presuming stealing all the high-end clients. The Reality is that is if you put employee in the responsibility of dealing with clients you have to deal with the prospect that he might steal them eventually. less people and less drama and possibly hiring subcontractors to handle the business that I pay these people a lot of the time to stand around and do nothing might be better. We have a established a business location and will probably be fine. previously I’ve been talking with my right hand man about my exit strategy but now I want to talk to him about his exit strategy, one of the employees is poison to the others I can hear him talking shit about me and the business. I’m sure a lot of you experience the same type of situation’s any advice on how you handled it and the outcomes thereof would be appreciated thanks guys
You’re intentionally and willingly keeping an employee around who talks smack about you behind your back and you know it. And you’re saying, “What do I do?”
You know what to do.
I was a principal in a company where we used the golden handcuffs approach to handling our employees. Our number one trait for hiring was someone who fit into our culture and someone we felt we could trust. If they proved themselves we made runs at them with big raises and paths to even greater prosperity. Nobody ever left our company voluntarily unless they were moving. We made it so attractive nobody would ever think of leaving, and that approach was one of the things that made our company successful.
It sounds like you’re doing the same kind of thing, rewarding your employees financially to incent them to stay. But you’re missing a major part of the process, which entails culling employees with entitlement mentalities or employees who otherwise are net drags on the business. So many workers today look at companies who hire them as evil greedy stupid, etc., and they have some moral imperative to attempt to do damage.
That’s why the guy with the big raise didn’t think it was enough. It’s never enough. Those kinds of employees despise you.
If you’re willing to open the money spigot to employees you need to expect the employees to bring a lot to the table as well. That’s the area you need to improve. There are people left who have a good work ethic, it just takes some effort to find them.