The Secret of Business Success: Great Employees (Duh!)

March 10, 2008 from bMighty.com - "Of course a great idea, a solid business plan, and careful spending are important ingredients in a successful company. But as an incendiary blog posting (unwittingly) revealed -- and what all smaller businesses need to always remember -- is that great employees are what make it all work. Make sure they want to stick around."

180 View (written by Lawrence Young) – In this thought-provoking article, Naomi Grossman writes about the responses received to a blog posting by Mahalo CEO and internet entrepreneur, Jason Calacanis, who had provided ’17 tips to save money while running a startup’.

One of Calacanis’ tips was to “Fire people who are not workaholics”. Needless to say, most of the nearly 200 people who responded to this suggestion were quite irate at Calacanis and his perceived ‘scrooge’ approach to human resource management.

One blogger went so far as to give five reasons why one should fire-the-workaholics, and added: “If your start-up can only succeed by being a sweatshop, your idea is simply not good enough. Go back to the drawing board and come up with something better that can be implemented by whole people, not cogs”.

Allen Stern at CenterNetworks wrote: "In all of my years of management, the best thing I ever did was give my teams more room to breathe. I'd put my hours worked in my career against anyone and I can assure you that I've lost a lot of great chances with great people because of putting work first always. Jason should consider it as well if he wants his team to stay on. Short term his strategy works, but won't in the long run. Burnout comes quick and with all of the current opportunities out there, people will leave when they are burned out. And when they leave, it will be at the worst time."

Following the hullabaloo of the negative sentiment expressed, can-you-have-a-life-and-work-at-a-startup-companyreeled it in and reconsidered, sorta. In fact, he stated that he really meant to say that employees need to be passionate about their job and the company they work for that, and he suggested that perhaps the headline of his ’17 tips’ article should be changed to"Calacanis fires folks who don't love their work”.

In my 30+ years in the field, I have often seen managers complain that their employees ‘don’t burn enough midnight oil’. In fact, a number of years ago the owner of a medium–sized distribution business in New York told me that he wanted to fire his Controller since the man went home between 6 and 7pm each day. When I suggested to him that the Accounting department was, to the Controller’s credit, the only well-functioning department in the company, the owner told me that he would prefer a Controller who stayed till 10 pm each night like him even if the work wasn’t done on-time or as well.

Empirical observation has taught me that measuring the hours one works is one of the first and most constantly taken measurements of an employee’s performance. Why? In my opinion, because it’s the fastest and easiest measurement to take. Sure, all things equal, the longer one works, the more one gets done.

But if truth be told, all things are not always equal. Productivity is impacted by many factors that are within the employer’s sphere of control, such as communicating clearly defined and achievable goals, providing the employee with the right tools to get the job done, assigning employees with sufficient skills to perform the task at hand, etc. Of course, there is no substitute for working hard, but one has to be conscious of the line that separates the positive benefits of hard work from burn-out and other negative consequences that often plague chronic workaholics.

By the way, one of my recommendations to the owner of the distribution company was to seek psychological counseling with respect to the anger and resentment he had towards employees who lived a more balanced and productive life than he did. Unfortunately for him, he did not take my advice to heart, and today he is a lonely and bitter individual, albeit a very financially successful entrepreneur. I suppose it all boils down to how one measure’s one’s own success!