Great businesses are built on the shoulders of great employees. It’s hard to build a great field service business if you have a revolving door of employees.
With that in mind, here are five reasons employees change jobs, and what you can do to keep your high-performing employees in your field service business:
They Hate Their Boss
The number one reason people switch employers is because they dislike their boss. It may be that they’re micromanaged (more on that later), it may be because their boss takes credit for their work, or it may because their boss doesn’t give them any constructive feedback. Whatever the case, bad bosses often are the reason your employees choose to leave.
One of the biggest problems small field service businesses is promoting based on tenure. Often, people who have worked the longest are promoted because, well, they’ve worked there the longest.
But that’s not a good reason to make someone a manager. Managers need a certain set of skills outside of business knowledge. They need to be able to coach employees. They need to be able to shoulder the blame when employees do poor work, and praise employees when they exceed expectations. They also need to be honest, trustworthy and generous. Leadership is a skill that can be taught, but you’ll know natural leaders when you see them.
Yes, failing to promote your most senior team member to a management role may hurt your senior member’s feelings, but if they aren’t a great leader, they’ll hurt your business. Which would you rather hurt?
They Hate That They Aren’t Empowered/Trusted
The world has changed in the past decade. Younger employees are less likely to desire to be just another cog in the machine. The days of going to work in factories and assembly lines is over. Employees want to feel empowered to make decisions. There’s an independent streak in millenials that makes them less likely to want to punch the clock day after day, and more likely to want a job that gives them a feeling of accomplishment.
The obvious solution is to empower your employees. Give them the leeway to try - and sometimes fail. For example, if your office manager has an idea for a social media promotion, let her run with it. Your role as an owner should be to make sure the project is on track and then to ask for an analysis of the results. If it doesn’t work, don’t berate your employee for the work, celebrate her attempt. If you aren’t failing, you aren’t trying.
If you empower your employees to do more than is in the job description, they’ll be happier and more innovative, and your business will likely reap the benefits.
They Hate the Lack of Advancement Opportunities
For most small service businesses, there really isn’t a career path for employees. They may have an opportunity to advance to a divisional manager or supervisor, but that’s about it. Some employees may like doing the same thing over and over and over and over again. But your best employees like new challenges and the opportunity to learn and grow.
So give them those opportunities. If you have an irrigation service technician who wants to learn more about web design, encourage him to pursue it. Then, give him an opportunity to improve your website.
One thing that Google does is encourage their employees to work on what they call 10% projects. They get to dedicate 10% of their time to projects that may not necessarily be a part of the product or project they’re working on. But it’s something they enjoy doing. You know what happened? Google continued to innovate and products like Gmail were the result.
Though you may not have true opportunities for advancement for your employees, there are certainly enough things you’d like to accomplish that your employees can help with - and that will teach them new things.
They Hate Their Pay
Seven years ago, when the U.S. was in the midst of the Great Recession, it wasn’t hard for most businesses to find employees. But now, as the economy has improved and unemployment has dropped, many small service businesses are finding it difficult to attract and retain employees. That fact has made it easy for employees to jump from one business to another in search of pay increases.
Which can be a problem for your business. You don’t want to lose talented employees, but do you have the financial resources to give pay raises?
You may have to get creative to solve this problem. Maybe you implement bonuses based on performance. That’s a short-term solution and, as long as it’s tied to business performance, shouldn’t significantly harm your business.
It’s also helpful to have a raise policy of some kind. Maybe it’s based on productive time. Maybe it’s based on post-service ratings - like those generated by our service business marketing add-on, HindSite Connect. Whatever it is, you need to have a compensation plan for your business. You don’t want quality employees leaving because the only way they can get a raise is by jumping ship.
They Hate Being Underappreciated
Joe Mauer is a baseball player for the Twins. A very highly paid baseball player for the Twins, earning around $23 million a year.
Even though he’s one of us and a native of St. Paul, Twins fans love to hate on Mauer. They see his pay and his production - he hits about 10 home runs, his batting average is hovering in the .270 range and he doesn’t drive in a ton of runs - and think he’s overpaid.
They’re partially right - Mauer isn’t the player he once was. Though he seems to have lost a lot of the power he once had, he’s still very very good at one thing - getting on base. As of this writing, he's gotten on base in more than 40 straight games. That’s very hard to do - it's the third longest such streak in the major leagues this year. It’s not DiMaggio’s 56 game hitting streak, but if you’re getting on base, you’re more likely to produce runs - and runs win games.
Mauer is underappreciated. Your employees might be as well. This is a simple one to fix: Thank your employees. HindSite’s owner does something simple every two weeks - he hand delivers employee paychecks to each of our desks and says thanks. It’s not something he needs to do - everyone has the money direct deposited into their accounts. But he does it because it’s part of our culture of being a team.
Sometimes it’s the little things that matter. Something as simple as saying thanks can go a long way toward making your employees feel appreciated.
Did you lose an employee for one of the reasons above? No problem! Download our free eBook, How to Hire the Best Employees for Your Green Industry Business, to learn how to find great employees for your field service business.
