People Count!: Never Underestimate the Value of Your Employees

By Nancy J Riesz

What is the most expensive item in your organization’s budget? People! Many businesses waste a lot of money because they do not treat their employees as their most valuable asset. This book is like receiving a blank check you get to write to yourself. The blueprint to success is in these pages!

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Nov 14, 2014
• ISBN: 9781483543093

Book preview

Author

Preface

What is the most expensive item in your organization’s budget? People!

This is why you need to learn how to maximize your ROI on those people.

Many businesses waste a lot of money. Why? Because they do not treat their employees as their most valuable asset.

Waste (v.) according to the Oxford Dictionary is to 1. Use to no purpose; 2. Give without effect; 3. Be expended without useful effect.

Synonyms include: squander, misuse and throw away.

How much is being thrown away?

A recent report estimates lost productivity costs our economy $360 billion (yes that a B)!

How much are you and your business contributing to the $360B? Not sure? I’ll help you do the math at the end of each chapter.

This book is about helping you improve the ROI in both your bottom lines – financial and human.

If you are making all the money you want and need, you can stop reading right now. However, I’ve not yet met anyone who couldn’t find a good use for more money.

If you want to work less, enJOY your work more and make more money for both you and your business, keep reading.

If you believe people are a necessary evil to achieving the results you want, you, too, can stop reading. If you truly do not care if your employees like working for your organization, you probably are not interested in what I have to say. And if you think accountability is an accounting term, you can put this book back on the shelf!

In my experience, most managers want to do a good job but have not been taught how to be a good boss. Learning how to be a manager people love to work with pays huge dividends - for all involved. If you are a new manager or aspire to be promoted, this book will accelerate your learning curve.

Most employees truly do want to do a good job. What they are lacking is a manager with a backbone who will hold all employees accountable and provide consequences based on the results.

If you are tired of working long days and nights and weekends trying to figure out how to make more money, I have good news for you.

It’s relatively simple to increase your and your company’s bottom-line: pay more attention to the people who work for you. Happy employees are more productive which leads to you and your company making more money. Place your focus on being a place people look forward to coming to work, working for managers whom they love to work with and allowing these people to do what they do best.

When you do these things, the money drain will slow and your profits will grow.

This is not about being a warm fuzzy. This is about creating more profit. That is the result from learning how to maximize your most valuable asset — your employees.

Do not be an organization with a great sounding mission, vision and values statements posted on your wall and in your annual report. Start acting on those words. Just like a gym membership, those statements only benefit your organization when you act on them.

Rather than complaining about business being off-shored, take action – the right actions. If you want to leap frog your profits, stop blaming the economy, global competition and worrying about laying people off, and start looking in the mirror.

Leading a business is not just having a title, a corner office and collecting a fat paycheck. Leaders have a vision they so strongly believe in that people want to help them make it happen. True leaders also want to share the benefits of their success. They embody the values and ethics posted on the wall in that mission statement.

We’ve all had bad bosses. I’ve had a rag doll of a manager who would not fire an employee even though peoples’ lives depended on her work, Attila the Nun who managed by fear and intimidation, and a manager whose ego could not fit in this universe.

Three out of four people leave a job, taking all the expertise learned at that company with them, because of their manager. I have seen over and over the significant difference there is in the profits of companies where people love to work versus those where people hate to work.

For 20+ years as a business coach, I have witnessed the convincing disparity in bottom-line results between clients who value their employees and those who do not. The wisdom I have acquired as a leader, manager and working with clients is distilled in this book. Apply the advice and watch your organization transform and your bottom line increase.

Business is about making money, not squandering it. Ninety-five percent of a business’s success is determined by the people who work in it. With your business’s prosperity depending on your employees, it makes sense — and dollars — to treasure them.

Treasure map enclosed. Let’s get to work!

Buried Treasure

What would your response be if I told you that your company is wasting a lot of money in a place you are least likely to look?

Tom Trantham has been carefully listening to his cows ever since they broke out of their feedlot and changed his life, and theirs. It was April, 1987 and his dairy was going broke fast as milk prices were low and costs were steeply rising. Many dairy farms had already closed their barn doors for good.

One night the cows broke out of the barn where they had been feeding on expensive rations and grazed on lush April grasses. The next milking, each of the escapees produced an additional quart of milk.

Wondering if it was a fluke or that his cows were trying to tell him something, the next night Trantham opened all the barn doors and allowed his cows to graze on the free-range pastures.

Result? The cows each produced about one half-gallon more each day and were leaving some of the expensive ration in the troughs.

Within a short period of time not only was production up, costs were down and Trantham’s normal work day had gone from eleven to seven hours. Although it was deviating from the normal dairy farm procedures of confining cows on concrete floors in large barns, growing, harvesting and storing feed, buying expensive ration and supplements, hauling food into the barn and toting the manure out, Trantham decided to continue this experiment.

Trantham planted grasses and small grains and divided the pastures into paddocks, rotating the grazing areas. As the cows grazed on the natural foods, they also fertilized each paddock with their manure. Trantham was also saving on vet bills which went from hundreds of dollars each month to zero. The cows continued to produce well beyond the average commercial cow’s life of five years.

Trantham also started spending more time with his cows and even started to name them as he came to know each cow as an individual.

Trantham says he loves when his cows nudge him and pull on his baseball cap and that his favorite time is when he moves the cows to a new paddock. He swears the cows jump up and down in anticipation and that many of them come up and say thank you before heading to the pasture to eat. For Trantham, it’s all about the cows.

It’s About You

What’s it all about for you?

Do you know all of your cows, I mean, people, by name?

This book is really about you and for you. It is a blueprint to help you succeed as the person in charge. You may need to shift how you think about some things. You may have to do some processes a little differently. Maybe even experiment with new methods and let go of old habits. It worked for Tom Trantham and his dairy farm. It can work for you and your company.

I have not yet worked with a farmer. My clients are companies and executives, leaders and managers who want to create places where people look forward to coming to work and be managers people love to work with. And improve their financials.

Simple? Usually. Easy? Not always. Worth it? Absolutely.

As a coach, my role is to ask questions to help you find your best answer, choice and action. It is also to help you to obtain new perspectives. Why is this important? Human nature is to resist change and slip back into comfortable habits. Until you make shifts in your thinking, change rarely lasts.

As a manager, you have an extraordinary opportunity to impact people, your organization and your community. You do this by looking at things in new ways. Like Tom Trantham, you and your business can benefit financially and personally when you listen to what the people who work with you are saying.

Once you look at things in a new way, you are able to challenge