Motivating Your Service Staff: School of Management 1998

A PERCEPTION PROBLEM. “If I think I give a lot of credit to my employees, but they say I don’t, am I right or wrong?” wondered Smigel. “I’m wrong. That’s why we as managers are always the problem with employees and why the knowledge of one’s own limitations is the first step toward success. We can’t do everything.”

From there, Smigel said managers have to be able to act upon that knowledge and do something about those limitations. “Otherwise, your business is destined to remain dormant as your competitors pass you by because they’ve learned how to support their limitations,” he predicted.

Indeed, professional lawn care and landscape companies nationwide generally believe they could grow their companies if only they could find additional, quality labor. In fact, better than 56 percent of the respondents to a Lawn & Landscape survey pointed to a lack of labor as the number one limitation on their ability to grow their businesses. “The good news for our country is that just about everybody is working,” Smigel observed. “The bad news is that there’s no one left to hire, and when you do hire, what do you end up with?”

Smigel has found, however, that most companies are ignoring a potential solution to this problem – the people they already have working for them. “Too many people are working for us without having to think, and a lot of that is our fault as managers because we don’t train people to think or expect them to think,” he said. “We have to raise our expectations and help these people stand up and do better.”

WHAT’S WRONG HERE? According to a survey cited by Smigel, some of the most common employee complaints about their jobs are: the hours worked (15 percent); amount paid (11 percent); benefits package (7 percent); tools available to them to do their job (7 percent); lack of training (6 percent) and unsafe working conditions (4 percent). But business managers often think these areas represent a great deal more than 50 percent of employees’ unhappiness with their jobs.

“Conflicts with management, unfair treatment by superiors and a lack of support or recognition – those three areas represented the other 50 percent of responses,” Smigel countered, explaining that too many managers focus on working ‘in’ the company as opposed to working ‘on’ the company.

“Half of the problems were problems with managers,” Smigel pointed out. “What employees are saying here is that there are problems that managers could fix pretty quickly, but instead they lead to employee turnover because we, as managers, don’t actually know what our employees want.

“A lot of managers would like their employees to do more so they can spend more time on the company’s vision,” Smigel continued. “Margaret Thatcher said a leader’s responsibility is to shine a spotlight on the future. As managers, we should all want to nurture our people to that goal, but instead we have to react everyday to operations and we never get to look at the future.”

Smigel noted that employers have to get to know employees to the point that they understand what each employee is ultimately looking for from the company. At the same time, the managers have to get employees to understand the goals and direction for the company. “When we have people who don’t know where we’re going as a company, what we’re trying to accomplish and the part they play in that, they’re just doing their job,” he explained. “If they understand all of this about the company, it will lead to involvement, which leads to commitment, which leads to ownership, which equals effectiveness.

TIMES ARE A CHANGIN’. The nature of the workplace has changed over the years. “Em-ployees expectations of bosses are different today,” recognized Smigel. “Managers used to review employees, but now they’re reviewing us. The pendulum is swinging away from bosses running the company, and I don’t think it has swung all the way out there yet.”

Such a shift in office dynamics underscores the value of being a proactive and involved manager, according to Smigel.

“Most companies don’t run forward – they run in place,” he said. “Too many people are trying to grow and solve problems by using the same thought processes that got them to the present situation. But what got you to where you are may not be what will get you to where you want to go. To move ahead, it may be necessary to change the way you do things and the way you think.”

Smigel’s work has led him to work with Federal Express, a company he claims is committed to involving all of its employees in its success. “FedEx has an annual 29-question survey for employees to fill out about their boss,” he noted. “It asks questions like, ‘How well do I listen? Do I provide recognition?’ If, according to his or her employees, a manager fails in an area, the company brings in a human resource development person to work with that manager, and this takes place all the way through the company, up to the CEO.

“FedEx understands that it’s the people that make up the company, not just the management,” Smigel continued. “And if the management isn’t doing what the people expect of it, then the company won’t grow.

“If we, as managers, don’t react to the employees in the same way, we’ll lose them, and they’ll go somewhere else to work,” Smigel concluded. “When it comes to leadership, you can’t afford not to invest yourself and your time in your people.