National Clothesline

BY ALLAN J. KATZ

Employee turnover is a fact of business life. A recent study showed that the associated costs of replacing each employee costs a company 29 to 46 percent of his or her salary!

In today’s world of one-to-one marketing and customer relationship management, it is essential to reduce turnover to help key employees nurture successful business relationships with customers. After all, your front counter people are your most valuable asset because they’re the key personnel who greet and interact with your customers.

As many drycleaners wrestle with changing from a company-based to a customer-based organization, employees face accountability, technology and behavioral challenges that must be addressed by management.

Why do people leave their jobs? What types of support and process changes do we need to implement to make it easier for valuable people to stay on the job? Do your people have the right knowledge, skills and attitudes to meet your customer service goals? Are employee expectations being met?

There are three major ways organizations can answer these difficult questions.

Whether spoken or unspoken, your expectations have a powerful impact on your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors and are the key drivers of your attitudes. Your attitudes in turn, influence performance, commitment and job satisfaction.

Research by Inscape Publishing Co. shows that when companies implement clearly defined, well-communicated expectations, their employees are happier, more fulfilled and more successful. Without a clearly defined mandate, many employee expectations go unspoken or unrealized.

Questions like: “Will my supervisor support a balance between work and my personal life?” Can I get flexible work hours, now that I have a child?” “Will my job be secure as long as I do my job well?”

Unless these expectations are managed properly, workplace satisfaction will be adversely affected.

Employers should make the work environment comfortable enough so that employees can express their expectations openly and honestly.

What expectations do employees express openly about your company’s structure, diversity tolerance, recognition for a job well done, autonomy to make decisions and feel valued, environmental concerns, freedom of expression about their roles and beliefs, teamwork and job stability?

Are employees comfortable enough to express their opinions openly?

Are you then meeting these expectations?

Or are they unspoken and unmet, leading to frustration and eventual turnover?

A recent study by Development Dimensions International (DDI) shows that 74 percent of employees leave because of limited growth and advancement opportunities; 58 percent leave because of noncompetitive compensation packages; and 47 percent because of high stress and burnout.

An open, sensitive work environment, where people understand each other and work together, is another key to keeping valued employees. Learn how to recognize different behavioral styles and you’ll be on your way to understanding your boss’s behavior, your team’s behavior and your own way of getting things done. Build rapport with fellow workers, employees and customers to insure your customer service message is getting through to everyone.

Sell your employees first on what makes you different… they’ll become more loyal!

Stress the fact that a drycleaning customer has the potential of spending several hundred, possibly thousands, of dollars with your establishment, so they should not be treated or judged on an individual sale, but on the lifetime value of the customer.

Do you tend to focus on details while your employees can’t seem to follow through on his promises? Do members of your team want to just keep the status quo while others are constantly demanding change?

Practically, employees and customers fall into four distinct behavioral “styles.” The closer you as the manager can match or understand your employees’ style, you’ll build a quality rapport which will spill over to your employees’ attitude with customers.

“D” Style employees are Direct. They tend to see challenges to overcome. They like to change, fix or control things. A real “go-getter.” They enjoy a fast-paced, results-oriented work environment with the opportunity to control things.

To keep these types of employee happy, give them some control. Throw out a challenge they can work on and accomplish. Ask them for “win-win” ideas and don’t bore them with all the details. Just the facts, please.

“I” Style employees are Influencers. High I’s might first be noticed by their enthusiasm, charm, sociability, persuasiveness and their expression of emotion. Some might call them “social directors” or “eternal optimists”. Others might refer to them as a “typical salesman” or a “dreamer who believes it!”

High “I” people tend to be involved with people, make a favorable impression, are enthusiastic, entertaining and involved in group activities.

If you want to motivate a high “I”, give some social recognition, encourage group activities, allow them to freely express themselves and — here’s a favorite! — give them lots of free rein with controls and details. They hate to be held down and often dread doing “the paper work!”

The High “S.” The person who invented the Boy Scout oath may have had a high “S” person in mind! They are loyal, kind, helpful, patient and predictable. They tend to develop specialized skills. They often are the ones who calm the “go-getters” of your workplace as they aim to create a stable, harmonious work environment.

If you want to motivate a high “S,” make changes in slow, bite size pieces that allow for some predictability. Give sound reasons for change, and your “S” can do it. Provide your “S” with routines without surprises and you will have a happy “S.”

You probably want your accountant and your detail-oriented employees who crave organization to be high in the “C” area of their behavioral style. They work conscientiously within existing circumstances to ensure quality and accuracy.

When I go golfing, I could care less about the score. “Just get the ball in the hole and let’s tee off for the next one! If it takes an extra nudge to get the job done, so be it.” I would obviously drive a high “C” person up the wall because he or she will keep score and make sure I play by the rules!

You can motivate a high “C” person by appreciating their value for quality and accuracy. I would be de-motivating a high “C” by rounding off the numbers and being content with just a rough draft for a final copy.

Your customer service and front counter people can build rapport quickly by practicing good rapport skills and understanding that the people they work with are not “good” or “bad” because they behave in a certain way. That’s just their “style.”

Your role as manager in creating a customer-focused culture must be consistent, planned and clarified. You must make sure that the way you measure and reward employee success is consistent with your customer service goals. Set the example for how you want your employees to interact with customers.

Clarify the purpose of becoming customer focused. Each employee should know what role they play in developing and implementing this new customer focused strategy. Internal research must determine which loyalty implementation methods are working and which are not.

Encouraging employees to be open and honest about their expectations, researching what they are truly feeling, establishing consistent guidelines in understanding diverse behavioral styles, reduce the risk of losing key employees in today’s volatile work environment.