Who would have ever thought of such a thing as training your employees to quit? On first read, this seemed like a crazy idea to me; why would a small business owner want to invest even more money into an employee that is just going to leave them for another company? As I read this article though, the whole idea seemed much more logical.
Derek Christian, the owner of a small business called My Maid Service, determined that although their company was making a respectable profit, the only factor keeping the company from reaching the next level was the staff turnover. As we have learned throughout the semester, staff turnover leads to a considerable amount of job dissatisfaction resulting in poor customer service. Let’s face it, most people don’t aspire to be maids and therefore it is hard to keep employees and even harder to keep them happy enough to please customers.
Christian, through the help of a consultant, determined that it would serve the company best to train his employees to move onto a better career after working for him. The only stipulation was that they had to stay at My Maid Service for at least two years. He will then pay for any training necessary to get his employees where they want to be in their career. This change resulted in zero staff turnovers in 2009. This concept ties directly to two very important concepts that we have continued to learn about throughout the semester: motivation and job satisfaction.
I believe that Christian is attempting to motivate his employees through empowerment. As chapter 6 in the textbook describes, there are two types of empowerment, structural and felt. Structural empowerment can be achieved through decision authority, leadership style, organizational structure, access to information, and organizational climate. In this case, the owner is achieving structural empowerment mainly through organizational structure and climate. He formed organizational structure by employing centralized management while still allowing employees to do their job without being micromanaged. This structure also included a policy that required an employee to work the full two years before completing their “training to quit” program, so in that regard My Maid Service was a fairly formal organization. The biggest part of structural empowerment displayed at this company though was organizational climate. The owner motivated the entire work force by offering the training free of charge to the employees. Therefore, employees were more motivated to work hard and go after the opportunities that were placed in front of them, instead of being stuck in the same job for years or quitting after a few weeks. The owner really inspired a belief in his employees that they could be anything they wanted to be after they did good work for him.
According to the textbook, felt empowerment includes: the need for work to be meaningful, employees to feel confident that they can perform the job, employees having discretion and autonomy at work, and for employees’ abilities to be allowed to influence how the company operates. At My Maid Service, Derek Christian is trying to instill felt empowerment in his employees because it will cause them to do a better job while they still work there. In this way, he makes maid service work meaningful; employees are not just cleaning houses, they are cleaning houses while taking classes at a community college or getting training in a different field. There is constantly a deeper reason as to why they are performing at their best, which is an incredibly motivating ideal.
All of the aforementioned components of working for My Maid Service lead to job satisfaction. Through this model of business, the employees will feel valued and will have a sense of responsibility for the work that they do. Also, through Christian’s way of hiring, he is more likely to find those with a strong person-organization fit; in other words, they are the employees that want to work for a business run in this fashion.
So what do you think, is it really an owner’s responsibility to get their workers trained to discover better futures? Or is this really just senseless in terms of costs to the business?
Article: http://money.cnn.com/2010/06/01/smallbusiness/staff_training/index.htm
Posted By:
Brittany Meredith
When reading this post I was quite surprised just like you were that a business owner would do this. It does make must sense to train your employees to quit. Then as you gave the ideas he had behind this it started to change my mind some. I think for his business this approach to employee turnover works well. It may be a little costly, but I think the positives outweigh the cost. To answers the question about if it is the owner’s responsibility to get their worker trained to discover better futures and I would say yes. I feel this way because people should always try to better people around them because all that can do is help you out. If all business owners did this there would be a lot more people in better situations. Unfortunately, the business world that we live in is not worried about the big picture, but just worried about themselves.
ReplyDeleteTeam 3
Jeff Blankenship
I would have to say that employers may inadvertently training their employees for the future. Mainly, because what employees learn from their company, they may take to to other companies and apply the same principles. It is like in school where they are teaching us how to get a job in the real world. The school doesn't want to have us simply stay in school they want us to leave and take the resources we have learned and apply them. It is just like with a job where a manager trains you. While they may not want you to leave, they may have trained you well enough to move on to the next challenge. If a manager has done their job then employees will leave for more challenging jobs because of the training they received.
ReplyDelete-Brian Cullum team 7
I agree with both of your responses to the post. The costs do seem to be outweighed by the benefits and I think the business world as a whole could really benefit from more companies incorporating this. We all should be there to help each other get better whether it's helping a fellow employee or training subordinates.
ReplyDeletePosted By: Brittany Meredith