By: Mary Miller, JANCOA CEO
In today’s business world, everyone seems to live in fear. From the business owner, to the department manager, to the employee performing the daily task at hand. No one knows what the future has in store for them, adding to the already existing issue; how do you get employees to care about their job regardless of the level of their position?
As Stephen Covey stated so well in “Seven Habits for Highly Effective People”, you must begin with the end in mind. What do people need? What is going to make tomorrow different than today? We all need something to strive for to improve our quality of life.
At JANCOA, Inc., we had more than a need to attract and engage employees. We (my husband and I) were in desperation mode. How do you manage a service business without enough employees? You don’t. In search for a solution, we started to really look at our employees’ lives and ask them what they wanted. We found that they wanted and needed hope that tomorrow would be different than today. And so we created an employee benefits program to inspire their dreams into reality!
We began by connecting our employees with agencies and groups that could help them realize their dreams. We helped them make a list of dreams they wanted to achieve in their lives and hired a Dream Manager to help them work through the process. Through the Dream Manager program, we have had employees purchase their first homes, purchase cars, go back to school and even learn new languages.
We understood that many of their dreams didn’t have anything to do with their jobs and we chose to let go of trying to trap them into a job and allow them the freedom to dream bigger. We promised to give them the tools and connections to go after a bigger future, if in return they gave us their best performance.
One of the most important lessons we have learned in the process is that people really feel better about themselves and their lives when they achieve success through their own actions. We didn’t make their dreams come true but instead, worked with them through a wall of fear to help them make that happen on their own. The result was a team of employees that felt good about themselves and became more engaged in their work, resulting in consistent quality. Our turnover rate went from 360 percent to 45 percent and our productivity doubled, showing a bigger profit than we had predicted.
The “magic” we found, is that when we started to take care of our employees, they took care of our customers. When you have happy employees working toward a goal in life and not just going through the everyday motions, everything improves.
