National Clothesline

Imagine for a moment that it’s 8:13 a.m. Monday morning and you’ve discovered that your delivery van and your boiler — whose warranties both expired last month — have conspired together to stop functioning today. Perhaps they would like to spend the day with your presser and spotter who both called in “sick” despite the fact that they sounded much healthier than they do while at work. Suddenly, the phone rings again. This time, it’s your accountant who has finished your taxes. He says you’d better sit down and take “lots and lots of Valium.” Before you can do that, however, a reporter bursts in the door, claiming to be putting together an unbiased news story for a local TV station called “Drycleaners: The Downfall of Civilization.”

Meanwhile, an inexplicable leak in your drinking fountain has begun showering your lobby with water.You reach for a mop only to helplessly watch a long-time customer walk in, slip and perform an involuntary flip before she awkwardly crashes down. “My spine!” she screams as you contemplate legal ramifications. You race to clean up the water to curtail additional liability fiascos but find yourself performing a similar somersault motion through the air because you also stepped in the water too fast. A couple of vertebrae “pop” in your neck as you land and tumble face first into the customer’s bag of dirty laundry, which, by the way, contains a quilt infested with cat urine.

At this point, several colorful words leap into your mind. Screaming them out seems like just the thing to make you feel better. Unfortunately, they are words that are usually considered obscene, so if you do end up letting out steam (hey somebody’s got to — the boiler sure isn’t), then you will make the day exponentially worse. It’s not just that the words might offend your customers into never coming back, but there’s the greater problem of your employees. Sure, they can feign sickness and ignorance with mind-boggling consistency, but if you decide to call them “incompetent”, “a liar” or a “no-good, stupid *#@!-wit of wasted DNA” — then you may as well direct those words right back at yourself.

Nowadays, if you say the wrong words in the presence of a sensitive employee, they will likely be scarred in a manner that only great financial recompense (i.e. suing the pressed pants off of you) can ever hope to heal. This month, columnist Frank Kollman (see page 50) delves humorously into the devastating effect that words can have on your employees, not to mention, the expensive fallout such a scenario might inflict upon your business. Check it out. You’ll be sorry as #!*$ if you don’t.

This isn’t about choosing coffee or pizza. It’s about reducing employee turnover. There’s no doubt that it hurts a business whenever a good employee, or even a mediocre one, leaves. First, there’s the time and expense of finding a replacement and the disruptions that occur when a business is operating short-handed. Then there is the time and expense it takes to train the replacement to get to the level of performance that the business requires.

A recent Wall Street Journal article discussed how two big employers — Starbucks and Domino’s — try to stem the tide of employee turnover and all the costs it entails. Starbucks believes simply in paying people a bit more than other employers who compete for the same workers. Friendly workplaces and good managers help, Starbucks believes, but higher wages make the difference.

Domino’s takes a different approach, and with some success the Journal reported. Pay is a factor, according to David A. Brandon, Domino’s chief executive officer, but he adds, “you can’t overcome a bad culture by paying a few bucks more.” What the company has done — and what has reduced its turnover rate from 158 percent to 107 percent — is to focus on store managers by hiring more selectively, coaching them on how to create a better workplace and motivating them with promises of compensation. The benefits go beyond stabilizing the workforce. When employees are committed to doing the job they have instead of looking for the next one, the stores do better, too. It seems that customers like to do business at places where the employees like to do their jobs. Domino’s reports that when turnover drops, revenues increase.

Maybe it’s time to call for a pizza delivery at the plant and treat your employees.