Release the reins

Before Eileen Michaels formed A Yard & A Half Landscaping, she worked as an auditor and special investigator at a utility company. What bothered her then was the lack of flexibility permitted for dealing with life outside the workplace. So when she started her own company, she stressed flexibility for employees as long as the job got done.

“If you have great employees, you want to do anything you can to keep them,” says Michaels, owner and general manager of the Waltham, Mass.-based company. “It’s really interesting because if people really believe you have their interest at heart, and you really do – it has to be genuine – then there’s nothing they won’t do for you.”

It’s that attitude that helped earn Michaels and her company the Inc. Magazine and Winning Workplaces 2010 Top Small Company Workplaces competition. The contest’s 20 other winners include operations like the New York Jets professional football team and Patagonia, an outdoor clothing designer and retailer.

Employees first. Michaels knows all about the pains of having to constantly train new workers. When she first formed the company, it was a revolving door of seasonal help. The stress of retraining made Michaels truly appreciate employees who showed loyalty and stuck around.

“Once I started to find others who were sincerely interested in working, what happened was my appreciation for them was so genuine and so obvious to them that many of them are still here,” she says.

She shows that appreciation through flexible hours for parents, something judges for the competition mentioned specifically. While some business owners may be afraid to give employees flexible hours, Michaels has no worries because she sees how hard they work.

“I don’t concern myself with that because they are getting the job done,” she says. “And that’s really what matters to me: Are our customers happy? Yes. Then that’s all that matters.”

Judges also liked the company’s peer-led bilingual training program and accommodations for workers who are breast-feeding infants.

The company’s accommodations for breast-feeding began when an employee had a baby but wanted to continue working after giving birth. Instead of making it a hassle for the employee to do all the things a breastfeeding mother has to do, Michaels wanted to make it easier for her to transition back to work.

Michaels gave the employee a private office and she was able to bring her baby to work three out of five days a week. 

“Infants sleep a lot so we hardly knew he was there,” she says. “Somehow she managed to get her work done efficiently and effectively and the rest of us really bonded with Yoni, her son.”

Let Go
Much like Michaels gave an employee the time and space to raise an infant and continue to work, she also gives her team the freedom to handle their job responsibilities. But it wasn’t always like that for Michaels. Once upon a time, she was an owner who had to do everything by herself.

“I can relate to some extent because way back when I used to be the one and only for everything – that’s how it is when you are a really small business – it just occurred to me that if I continued that way that there’s no way we were going to grow,” she says.

By relaxing her grip on daily tasks, Michaels learned that the people she hired could help her carry some of that load.

“I had to start really delegating and putting the responsibility in other people’s hands. It wasn’t until I dropped the ball that the ball was picked up,” she says.

Michaels advises company executives who struggle with stepping away from day-to-day tasks to take a break. She is confident they’ll like the results.

“The best thing I did was take a two-week vacation and came back and realized the company was functioning,” she says. “I don’t mean to sound cavalier about it. It’s difficult at first, but I’ve had so much positive reinforcement from it that then it became second nature. Drop that ball because they really will pick it up.”

If you don’t drop the ball, she says, a valued employee might go elsewhere where he or she can pick it up and run with it.

“The moral of the story, I guess, is that people can think for themselves if you expect them to or ask them to,” she says.  “If you are too hands-on, it can hurt you because you remove the necessity for them to figure it out on their own.  You actually rob them of an opportunity to grow.  And that’s what most people want to do.”

Open the Books
Michaels’ transformation from cautious owner also applies to the the company’s financials; she shares them with all employees. Keeping those numbers secret used to be a top priority, but now she can’t stress enough how releasing those numbers to employees benefited the organization.

She changed her mind when an employee thought Michaels was making a lot of money. After showing the numbers, it was clear Michaels wasn’t driving home to a million-dollar mansion in an affluent neighborhood with the top down in a new BMW.

“All of my reservations about (releasing financials) went totally out the window when we started doing it,” Michaels says. “None of those reservations hold up. People are so much more engaged when you make them part of the process.”

The author is associate editor of Lawn & Landscape. E-mail him at bhorn@gie.net.