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How Ritz-Carlton Goes the Extra Mile // Book Summary of ‘The New Gold Standard’

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Psychologist Joseph Michelli’s The New Gold Standard (2008) describes how luxury hotel chain Ritz-Carlton has programmed its organization to foster customer-centric behavior in employees at all levels.

Ritz-Carlton’s clearly-defined and well-implemented cultural principles, called “Gold Standards,” enable the company’s employees to deliver the exceptional service that its refined customers have come to expect. Ritz-Carlton’s brand recognition is so deep-rooted that such phrases as “ritzy” and “putting on the ritz” have become part of the lexicon.

Values First

Ritz-Carlton propagates its customer-centricity goals by making a compact trifold “Credo Card” part of each employee’s uniform. These cards describe the “ultimate guest experience,” and they are shared with guests eagerly. Michelli writes, “Ultimately the value of the Credo or any other core cultural roadmap is the opportunity it affords those inside the business to realize how the ideal customer and staff experience looks and feels.”

Service Principle #10 of Gold Standards states, “When a guest has a problem or needs something special, you should break away from your regular duties to address and resolve the issue.” Irrespective of rank and title, every employee can spend as much as $2,000 per day per guest without a supervisor’s approval to solve a guest’s problem. This distinctive policy not only permits the employees to fulfill their guests’spoken and implied needs but also empowers employees to use their best judgment to create memorable and personal experiences for guests.

While some might think that this type of empowerment is both ill advised and financially irresponsible, leadership at Ritz-Carlton has determined the trust they place in employees is well founded. Rather than being extravagant with the resources entrusted to them, the employees tend to be very cautious … the advantage of the $2,000 staff empowerment is that the employees don’t have to delay a service response by taking it up to the next level in the organization, and they can take the initiative to enhance guest experiences.

Empowerment through Trust

Guided by co-founder Horst Schulze’s oft-cited business principle, “Ladies and gentlemen serving ladies and gentlemen,” Ritz-Carlton selects, trains, and cultivates a dedicated workforce of outstanding professionals who are just as deserving of respect as Ritz-Carlton’s upscale guests.

Ritz-Carlton’s customer-centric principles and culture inform its hiring and training processes and preside over the rewards and promotion systems. Managers use every opportunity to go over the company’s values and remind everybody to polish up on caring for guests. For example, at the start of each shift, everyone—from laundry staff to executives—participates in a 15-minute “lineup” to talk about the nitty-gritty of the Gold Standards.

Michelli observes, “When it comes to the Gold Standards, Ritz-Carlton leaders and frontline staff alike can appear, from an outsider’s perspective, to be teetering toward the fanatical.” No wonder, then, that Ritz-Carlton has become a paradigm for the highest level of sustainable customer experience. In the year 2000, the company launched the Ritz-Carlton Leadership Center to offer courses and to consult for anyone interested in its cult of customer service. In 2001, when Steve Jobs and Ron Johnson were preparing to launch Apple Stores, they sent executives to Ritz-Carlton’s leadership program to learn about offering the best customer experience. Apple’s notion of anticipatory customer service and the concept of Genius Bars originated from Ritz-Carlton.

Delivering Wow!

During the “lineup” meetings, Ritz-Carlton managers and leaders also reinforce the customer-service principles by sharing “Wow!” stories of delighting guests. The internal communication department collects such stories each week and publishes them in the in-house newsletters. “Positive storytelling. The ability to capture, share, and inspire through tangible examples of what it means to live the Credo and core corporate values.”

The New Gold Standard includes many anecdotes from hotel guests, employees, managers, and executives to explain how Ritz-Carlton has “going above and beyond the call of duty” embodied in its culture.

  • A breakfast waiter scurried to a neighborhood grocery store to buy a guest’s preferred grape jelly when the dining room did not have it on hand.
  • At the Ritz-Carlton Dubai, a manager and a staff carpenter built a temporary access ramp made of wood boards to allow a guest and his wheelchair-bound wife to access the sandy beach, dine by the ocean, and watch the sun go down.
  • When a guest called the Ritz-Carlton Naples to notify that she had run out of gas, a doorman filled up a few five-gallon gasoline containers and drove 40 miles to help out the stranded woman and her children.
  • During Hurricane Katrina, employees of the Ritz-Carlton New Orleans pushed laundry carts loaded with luggage and guests through flooded streets to get them to safe locations.

Lest the reader dismisses these as cherry-picked examples of “overdoing it” in Michelli’s laudatory narrative, these cases in point are demonstrative of the Ritz-Carlton DNA. The employees feel thoroughly invested in and trusted by their employers. And Ritz-Carlton recognizes that customer loyalty is dependent upon the frontline employees who administer such sophisticated service daily.

Idea for Impact: Foster a foundation of customer-centricity

Speed-read Joseph Michelli’s The New Gold Standard. It offers ample insights into establishing your own gold standards for achieving excellence in customer service.

  • Create a customer-centric culture that identifies, nurtures, and reinforces service-excellence as a primary guiding principle. “Leadership often involves fostering the environment in which everyday creativity emerges in response to the needs of specific customer groups.”
  • Foster a culture where employees take up personal accountability for resolving customers’ problems.
  • Train employees to anticipate and fulfill the unmet—even unstated—needs of customers.
  • Reiterate that providing a ‘wow!’ experience should be each employee’s goal during every interaction with a customer.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. How to Develop Customer Service Skills // Summary of Lee Cockerell’s ‘The Customer Rules’
  2. A Rule Followed Blindly Is a Principle Betrayed Quietly
  3. Putting the WOW in Customer Service // Book Summary of Tony Hsieh’s Delivering Happiness
  4. From the Inside Out: How Empowering Your Employees Builds Customer Loyalty
  5. Consistency Counts: Apply Rules Fairly Every Time

Fire Fast—It’s Heartless to Hang on to Bad Employees

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Firing is About an Underlying Commitment to Retaining Great People

The former General Electric leader Jack Welch earned the moniker “Neutron Jack” for sacking some 100,000 employees in the early years of his tenure as chief executive. Welch defended the dismissals by emphasizing that it would have been far more heartless to keep those employees and lay them off later when they had little chance of reinventing their careers. The dismissals were part of his deliberate efforts to establish a corporate culture that emphasized honest feedback and where only the “A players” got to stay.

Many Fired Employees Feel Surprised That the Axe Didn’t Fall Sooner

Managers know that ending a bad fit sooner is better than doing it later. Firing a bad employee is often better for both the employee leaving and the employees remaining.

Then again, many managers hesitate because firing is awfully difficult. No one likes to fire people. Looking an employee straight in the eye and telling he’ll no longer have a job is one of the harshest things a manager will ever have to do.

Besides, some managers are so uncomfortable with conflict that they are unwilling to deal directly and honestly with a problem employee, not to mention of confronting the risk of a wrongful termination claim.

If an Employee is Not Working out for You, Fire Fast

By holding on to a bad employee, you are really doing a disservice to the employee. Forcing a person to be something he’s are not, and giving him the same corrective feedback—week after week and quarter after quarter—is neither sustainable nor considerate. Trying to keep the employee in the wrong role prevents his personal and professional evolution.

  • Give the employee a chance to turn the situation around—people can change.
  • Try to find him an appropriate role within your company. Recall the old Zen poem,

    Faults and delusions
    Are not to be got rid of
    Just blindly.
    Look at the astringent persimmons!
    They turn into the sweet dried ones.

    However, if the employee is a truly bad fit, reassigning him just shifts the problem to a different part of the company.

  • If your efforts to remediate a bad employee haven’t worked out, cut your losses and fire him promptly. Help the employee move on to a job or a company where the fit is much better.

Idea for Impact: It is much worse to retain someone who is not suited for his job than it is to fire him. Help him find a new role quickly and land on his feet.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. General Electric’s Jack Welch Identifies Four Types of Managers
  2. How to Manage Overqualified Employees
  3. What To Do If Your New Hire Is Underperforming
  4. Fostering Growth & Development: Embrace Coachable Moments
  5. Seven Real Reasons Employees Disengage and Leave

Beware of Key-Person Dependency Risk

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Key-Person Dependency Risk is the threat posed by an organization or a team’s over-reliance on one or a few individuals.

The key-person has sole custody of some critical institutional knowledge, creativity, reputation, or experience that makes him indispensable to the organization’s business continuity and its future performance. If he/she should leave, the organization suffers the loss of that valued standing and expertise.

Small businesses and start-ups are especially exposed to key-person dependency risk. Tesla, for example, faces a colossal key-man risk—its fate is linked closely to the actions of founder-CEO Elon Musk, who has come under scrutiny lately.

Much of Berkshire Hathaway’s performance over the decades has been based on CEO Warren Buffett’s reputation and his ability to wring remarkable deals from companies in duress. There’s a great deal of prestige in selling one’s business to Buffett. He is irreplaceable; given his remarkable long-term record of accomplishment, it is important that much of what he has built over the years remains intact once he is gone. Buffett has built a strong culture that is likely to endure.

Key Employees are Not Only Assets, but also Large Contingent Liabilities

The most famous “key man” of all time was Apple’s Steve Jobs. Not only was he closely linked to his company’s identity, but he also played a singular role in building Apple into the global consumer-technology powerhouse that it is. Jobs had steered Apple’s culture in a desired direction and groomed his handpicked management team to sustain Apple’s inventive culture after he was gone. Tim Cook, the operations genius who became Apple’s CEO after Jobs died in 2011, has led the company to new heights.

The basic solution to key-person dependency risk is to identify and document critical knowledge of the organization. (Capturing tacit knowledge is not easy when it resides “in the key-person’s head.”) Organizations must also focus on cross-training and succession planning to identify and enable others to develop and perform the same tasks as the key-person.

Idea for Impact: No employee should be indispensable. A well-managed company is never dependent upon the performance of one or a few individuals. As well, no employee should be allowed to hoard knowledge, relationships, or resources to achieve job security.

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  5. The Dramatic Fall of Theranos & Elizabeth Holmes // Book Summary of John Carreyrou’s ‘Bad Blood’

Seven Easy Ways to Motivate Employees and Increase Productivity

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If you’re a manager, you can become a motivator by inspiring your employees to high performance—and produce beyond the ordinary.

  1. Purpose. Even the mundane can become meaningful in a larger context. Howard Schultz, the founder and CEO of Starbucks once said about providing propose, “People want to be part of something larger than themselves. They want to be part of something they’re really proud of, that they’ll fight for, sacrifice for, that they trust.” Sometimes that’s all people need to get their skates on—because nothing is worse than feeling that they’re are stuck doing a meaningless task.
  2. Autonomy. Empower people to innovate and make decisions. Be clear about performance expectations. Reduce your direct supervision of their work. Don’t micromanage.
  3. Appreciation. Reward your employees’ small as well as big successes. Recognition is easy and need not be expensive and time-consuming.
  4. Involvement. Interact directly with frontline employees, observe their work, solicit their opinions, seek ideas for improvement, and work directly with the frontline to identify and resolve problems. Encourage employees to talk about the “undiscussable,” even if others don’t want to hear it.
  5. Challenge. Put people in situations where they can grow, learn new skills, and gain new knowledge.
  6. Urgency. Disregard command-and-control and, instead, become an expediter and facilitate your employees getting their job done. The pioneering management guru Peter Drucker encouraged managers to frequently ask of employees the one question that can initiate more improvement than any other: “What do I do that wastes your time without contributing to your effectiveness?”
  7. Empathy. Care about your employees’ success and give them hope about their performance. Be sincere. Demonstrate you value differing opinions.

Idea for Impact: The bottom line on motivation is this: People know what motivates them. Ask them. You may not have any idea what they want.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. General Electric’s Jack Welch Identifies Four Types of Managers
  2. Eight Ways to Keep Your Star Employees Around
  3. Seven Real Reasons Employees Disengage and Leave
  4. To Inspire, Pay Attention to People: The Hawthorne Effect
  5. Four Telltale Signs of an Unhappy Employee

Book Summary of Leigh Branham’s ‘The 7 Hidden Reasons Employees Leave’

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Employee engagement and retention of top talent is a holy grail of people management—and nearly as hard to pin down.

Employees expect managers to be fair, pay fairly, listen, value opinions, relate, develop, challenge, demonstrate care, advance, and so on. But many employees don’t know when and how to voice their concerns, or negotiate for what they want.

All managers know that engaged employees are happier and more productive. Yet, managers and HR managers cannot simply make employee engagement “happen.”

'The 7 Hidden Reasons Employees Leave' by Leigh Branham (ISBN 0814408516) In The 7 Hidden Reasons Employees Leave, employee-retention expert Leigh Branham discusses how companies can tackle employee disengagement and retain their best and brightest people.

Using a copious amount of facts and figures from interviews and surveys, Branham explores seven reasons for employee disengagement. For each reason, Branham lists signs that managers need to keep their eyes open for, and shows how employers and employees could communicate and understand their mutual needs and desires.

“Some Quit and Leave … Others Quit and Stay”

According to Branham, employee disengagement—and eventual resignation—is not an event; rather, it is a plodding process of bitterness, discontent, and eventual withdrawal that can take weeks, months, or even years until the definite choice to resign happens. He lists the ten most common stimuli that trigger employee disengagement:

  1. Poor management
  2. Lack of career growth and advancement opportunity
  3. Poor communications
  4. Issues with pay and remuneration
  5. Lack of recognition
  6. Poor senior leadership
  7. Lack of training
  8. Excessive workload
  9. Lack of tools and resources
  10. Lack of teamwork

Branham claims to have synthesized some 20,700 employee-exit surveys and has identified four fundamental human needs (compare to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs) that must be met by employers:

  • Employees need to feel proficient. They want to be matched to a job that aligns with their talents and their desire for a challenge.
  • Employees need to feel a sense of worth. They want to feel confident that their commitment and their efforts translate into meaningful contributions to their company’s mission. They desire to be recognized and rewarded appropriately.
  • Employees need to be trusted. They expect their employers to pay attention, and be honest and open in their communications.
  • Employees need to have hope. They want to be treated fairly, and given opportunities to grow their skills and advance their careers.

Why Employees Start Feeling Disconnected from Their Work

The core of The 7 Hidden Reasons Employees Leave is a “how to” guide to address each of the seven reasons to enable a company to pursue the path to become an “employer of choice.”

Reason #1: The Job or Workplace Was Not as Expected. Many new hires join their companies with a wide range of misconceptions and unrealistic expectations. Some stay and adapt, others disengage and stay, and some others disengage and ultimately leave. Branham advocates creating realistic job descriptions, and open communications between managers and employees on achieving their mutual goals and expectations.

Reason #2: The Mismatch between Job and Person. Companies with strong reputations for selecting the right talent and keeping employees well matched with their jobs have a strong commitment to the continuous upgrading of talent. Managers can assign tasks so that employees can be more engaged through the use of their “motivated abilities.” Managers must keep an eye open opportunities to augment employees’ jobs by delegating tasks they might not have considered before.

Reason #3: Too Little Coaching and Feedback. Branham affirms that most managers do coaching and feedback merely as annual or biannual HR-required discussions that bind ambiguous targets to performance-ranking and pay scale. Managers must lead frequent, informal, on-the-job feedback conversations with employees. Branham identifies four principal themes that managers must address to make their performance management practice seem less controlling and more of a partnership:

  1. “Where are we going as a company?”
  2. “How are we going to get there?”
  3. “How does the manager expect the employee to contribute?”
  4. “How is the employee doing? What is going well? What are the key suggestions for improvement?”

Reason #4: Too Few Growth and Advancement Opportunities. Branham observes that most talented employees cannot pinpoint and articulate, and often underuse their greatest strengths. He encourages companies to provide self-assessment tools and career management training for all employees, enabling them to be the best they possibly can be. Most “employers of choice” have a strong mentoring culture. They communicate that employees must take the initiative in their own career development.

Reason #5: Feeling Devalued and Unrecognized. To Branham, many companies do not have a formal and informal culture of recognition because their managers are themselves too busy with their nominal responsibilities to pay adequate attention to employees’ performance. Or, they can’t discern between average and superior performance. He lists recommendations for competitive base- and variable-pay linked to achieving business goals. He reminds managers that employees are hungry to be listened to, and want their ideas sought and implemented.

Reason #6: Stress from Overwork and Work-life Imbalance. Branham observes that the relationships employees form with other employees is a glue that binds people to their workplaces. He encourages fostering social connectedness by assigning cross-functional team projects and organizing group outings.

Reason #7: Loss of Trust and Confidence in Senior Leaders. When senior leaders don’t back up pronouncements such as “people are our most important asset” with their actions, even mid-level managers begin to question the decisions and the actions of senior leaders. The result is a manifest lack of enthusiasm in the workplace, and in the rising complaints and questions about policies and practices. Leaders must set the tone for workplace culture and must back up their words with actions to discourage employee cynicism and disengagement.

Becoming an Engaged Leader is the Embodiment of What Leadership Means

Recommendation: Fast read Leigh Branham’s The 7 Hidden Reasons Employees Leave. This book makes a great reading for managers and leaders who will need to scratch beneath the surface to recognize unhappy employees before it’s too late, and then engage their employees better and retain their top talent.

While many of the book’s themes may appear familiar, The 7 Hidden Reasons discuses many ideas and “engagement practices” in great specificity to help managers and leaders keep their antennae up for signs of bitterness and discontent, and correct before they lose their best and brightest people. This practical tome can also help employees discuss and resolve their needs and desires.

Developing a deep understanding of what causes employees to lose motivation, disengage, and leave cannot be ignored or overlooked. Managers and leaders who can resolve the divergence that employees feel between their personal values and the best interests of their businesses will gain immeasurably by having a highly engaged and productive workforce.

Wondering what to read next?

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  2. Bringing out the Best in People through Positive Reinforcement
  3. How to Promote Employees
  4. Seven Easy Ways to Motivate Employees and Increase Productivity
  5. Fire Fast—It’s Heartless to Hang on to Bad Employees

One of the Tests of Leadership is the Ability to Sniff out a Fire Quickly

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I’ve previously stressed the importance of problem-finding as an intellectual skill. I’ve also highlighted why risk analysis and risk reduction should be one of the primary goals of any intellectual process. In this article, I’ll write about being proactive in identifying problems before they evolve into crises.

How Wells Fargo Failed to Recognize a Problem and Address it before it Became a Bigger Problem

As the Wells Fargo accounts scandal unfolded, it was clear that Wells Fargo’s leadership was well aware of the burgeoning problems early on, but failed to act decisively and nip the problem in the bud.

Given impossible sales quotas to reach, Wells Fargo’s “high pressure sales culture” opened as many as two million bank and credit card accounts on behalf of its customers without their consent. Employees were rebuked or even fired for not meeting aggressive cross-selling targets.

Human nature is such that high-pressure demands can deplete the willpower people need to act morally and resist temptations. And such demanding circumstances encourage people to go into defensive mode, engage in self-interested behaviors, and consider only short term benefits and dangers.

Leadership Lessons from the Wells Fargo Accounts Scandal: “A Stitch in Time Indeed Saves Nine”

Leadership Lessons from the Wells Fargo Accounts Scandal Wells Fargo’s leadership reportedly had data about ethical breaches, but they ignored or misjudged the impact of the problem. Wells Fargo even held a two-day ethics workshop in 2014 unequivocally telling their employees not to do that. As per an internal review, managers knew that 1% of employees had been fired for “sales integrity” violations.

Wells Fargo’s leadership didn’t act quickly and decisively to mitigate the effects of the crisis. Warren Buffett, one of the Wells Fargo’s biggest investors, summarized this leadership inaction at the 2017 Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting:

There were three very significant mistakes, but there was one that was worse than all the others … The main problem was that they didn’t act when they learned about it … at some point if there’s a major problem, the CEO will get wind of it. And at that moment, that’s the key to everything, because the CEO has to act. It was a huge, huge, huge error if they were getting, and I’m sure they were getting, some communications and they ignored them or they just sent them back down to somebody down below.

Leadership: “Only the Paranoid Survive”

Andy Grove (1936–2016,) the illustrious cofounder and CEO of Intel, was a famous worrier. At Intel, the focal point of Grove’s leadership style was worry and skepticism. He believed that business success contains the seeds of its own destruction, and that in order for an organization to have longevity, it needs to continue to worry about the future.

'Only the Paranoid Survive' by Andrew S. Grove (ISBN 0385483821) Grove’s principle was immortalized in his famous proclamation, “Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive.” He eloquently explained his worrisome mantra in his bestselling corporate memoir, Only the Paranoid Survive (1996.) He wrote in the preface:

The things I tend to be paranoid about vary. I worry about products getting screwed up, and I worry about products getting introduced prematurely. I worry about factories not performing well, and I worry about having too many factories. I worry about hiring the right people, and I worry about morale slacking off. And, of course, I worry about competitors. I worry about other people figuring out how to do what we do better or cheaper, and displacing us with our customers.

At Intel, worrying about the future created a culture of triumph that propelled change and innovation. Grove never let Intel rest on its laurels and led the company to break boundaries in microprocessor innovation. During his tenure as CEO from 1987—98, Intel’s stock price rose 32% a year. Grove also said, “A corporation is a living organism; it has to continue to shed its skin. Methods have to change. Focus has to change. Values have to change. The sum total of those changes is transformation.”

Idea for Impact: Learn to Sniff out a Fire Better than Anyone Does

The principal tasks of leadership are (1) identifying the biggest risks and opportunities, and (2) allocating organizational resources. Therefore, one of the tests of leadership is the ability to recognize a problem before it becomes a disaster. If identified and addressed early, nearly any problem can be resolved in a way that is beneficial for everyone involved.

Many leaders tend to be reactionary—they claim, “why fix something that isn’t broken.” Even when they see an impending problem, they may assume that the problem “isn’t that big of a deal” and wish the problem will just go away. Alas, many problems never go away; they only get worse.

To become a good leader, be paranoid—always assume that “there’s no smoke without fire.” If, according to Murphy’s Law, everything that can go wrong will go wrong, the paranoid leader has an advantage.

Whenever you are doing anything, have your eyes on the possibility of potential problems and actively mitigate those risks. Never allow a problem to reach gigantic proportions because you can and must recognize and fix it in its early stages.

As the medieval French philosopher and logician Peter Abelard (1079–1142) wrote, “The beginning of wisdom is found in doubting; by doubting we come to the question, and by seeking we may come upon the truth.”

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Job-Hunting While Still Employed

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Searching for a new job without revealing that you aren’t very pleased at your current job or getting fired can be a challenge. Here are four ways to job-hunt with caution.

  • Examine your motivations before job-hunting. Many people who jump ship in frustration run into the same problems that were an obstacle with previous employers. Try to ask for honest feedback about how you’re perceived by your managers and what’s holding you back from a promotion. You’ll find it easier to tackle career progression frustrations in a familiar environment at your current employer rather than at a new company where you’ll be under pressure to learn the ropes and produce results quickly.
  • Respect your employer’s time and resources. Don’t job-search on company time—your current job responsibilities are your priority. Looking for another position typically involves having to be away from your office for interviews; use your vacation days—not sick days—for job-searching and interviewing. Be careful about using your work computer to look up jobs, contact recruiters, or update your social-media presence.
  • Be tactful about whom you tell that you’re looking for another job. Even if you trust your coworkers, you can’t limit what they may share with others. Some of your coworkers may be ethically obligated to keep your boss and your company informed about any prospective changes in staffing or anything that might affect the organization’s goals. Be cautious about how you promote yourself on LinkedIn and job-search websites.
  • If you are offered a new job, be straight with everyone. Inform your boss immediately. Give as much notice as required, plan to tie up loose ends, and offer to help transition your responsibilities to a successor. Don’t be unreasonable in leveraging your new job offer to negotiate a counteroffer from your employer. Do your best to leave on the right note. Be consistent in what you tell different people about why you’re leaving. Do not burn bridges in the job-transition process.

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  4. What’s Next When You Get Snubbed for a Promotion
  5. Don’t Use Personality Assessments to Sort the Talented from the Less Talented

Seven Real Reasons Employees Disengage and Leave

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Engaged employees not only contribute more and enhance bottom-line results but also are more loyal and therefore less likely to leave their organizations voluntarily.

Here are seven widespread root causes for employees’ lack of enthusiasm and commitment to a workplace.

  1. Employees find the job or workplace to be different from what they had expected when hired.
  2. Employees are not well matched or challenged in the jobs to which they have been assigned or promoted.
  3. Employees receive insufficient coaching and feedback from their boss.
  4. Employees recognize few prospects for professional growth and advancement. Alternatively, employees are obliged to log two or three years of unexciting assignments to “pay their dues” before being considered for promotion.
  5. Employee feel undervalued, underpaid, or under-recognized. They don’t get enough informal acknowledgement for their contributions or feel constantly “out of loop.” Their managers don’t seek opinions or supply the right tools to excel at work.
  6. Employees feel stressed or burned-out due to overwork or work-life imbalance.
  7. Employees have lost trust and confidence in their management and leadership.

Idea for Impact: Disengaged employees are more likely to leave their organizations.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. General Electric’s Jack Welch Identifies Four Types of Managers
  2. Fire Fast—It’s Heartless to Hang on to Bad Employees
  3. Eight Ways to Keep Your Star Employees Around
  4. To Inspire, Pay Attention to People: The Hawthorne Effect
  5. Seven Easy Ways to Motivate Employees and Increase Productivity

How to Handle Employees who Moonlight

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Moonlighting—working a part-time job or having a business “on the side”—can pose a challenge for employers. Moonlighting can lead to divided allegiance, conflicts of interest, and poor job performance.

Employers expect employees to be present and prompt at their jobs. If employees are hustling to attend to multiple commitments, fatigue, lack of sleep, poor attentiveness, tardiness, and absenteeism can become problems. When an employees’ moonlighting hurts their on-the-job performance, employers are within their rights to discipline and terminate employees. For these reasons, some employers limit or prohibit moonlighting.

The proactive approach to moonlighting

One way to head off moonlighting problems is to have a policy about part-time jobs and running side businesses. Institute a policy that sets performance expectations, protects proprietary information, avoids conflicts of interest, and averts divided allegiance. Your moonlighting policy cannot regulate employees’ off-duty activities or prohibit employees from having other jobs. But it may expect employees to disclose and get approval for supplementary employment. A moonlighting policy may also require senior managers and leaders to disclose directorships and financial interests in other companies.

Tell employees they can’t mix their business with your company’s business

If you find an employee doing side work for pay from your office, tell him that this is a clear violation of office expectations; he should conduct no business other than your company’s during work hours. Tell your employee, “You can’t mix your other business with our business. Your time at this job should be exclusively for this job. Our company resources are for our company’s purposes only.”

If your employee gets occasional calls that he needs to attend to, reiterate the above expectation and encourage him to answer the calls during break time and away from his desk. Encourage him to respond to those calls with “I’m at my other job right now. Let me call you back later.”

Discourage employees from selling stuff to other employees

If you find an employee selling stuff to other employees or soliciting outside business during paid working time, discourage it as soon as you discover it. Explain how this interferes with your office’s work.

Discourage your employees from turning your office into a showroom and making customers of other employees. Selling merchandise could impair work relationships when a buyer is unhappy with a product or service. Worse yet, side-businesses can easily grow unmanageable in case of network marketing programs (e.g. Amway, Herbalife) that encourage upselling or getting others involved as salespeople.

Employees can involve their colleagues in side-businesses outside your office, as long as such activities don’t harm at-work relationships.

Idea for Impact: Managers can forestall many employee problems by being proactive and setting expectations

In general, moonlighting is neither unethical nor illegal. It may become an issue when the employer specifically prohibits it and/or where the other job is with a competitor, supplier, or customer and is therefore a potential conflict of interest. The only time you really need to challenge an employee’s moonlighting is when it can affect your business in terms of conflicts of interest and deficient work performance.

Bear in mind: don’t overlook or disregard such concerns until they become major problems.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Fire Fast—It’s Heartless to Hang on to Bad Employees
  2. Should Staff Be Allowed to Do ‘Life Admin’ at Work?
  3. Can You Be Terminated for Out-of-Work Conduct?
  4. One of the Tests of Leadership is the Ability to Sniff out a Fire Quickly
  5. A Sense of Urgency

Eight Ways to Keep Your Star Employees Around

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Every manager should make employee retention a priority and regularly inquire, “How many of my star employees would leave my organization if they could?”

Employee turnover can be expensive. Managers must find and hire replacements, invest in training the new employees, and wait for them to get to up to speed—all while suffering productivity shortfalls during the transition. The more talented an employee, the higher the cost of replacing him/her.

Here’s what you need to do to keep your star employees around.

  1. Identify them. Find key attributes that distinguish top performers from average performers. Then rank your team against these attributes and identify those employees who are critical to your organization’s short- and long-term success.
  2. Perform salary and compensation research within your industry and offer an attractive-enough benefits package. Beyond a particular point, compensation loses much of its motivating power. Consider flexible work arrangements.
  3. Understand what your star employees value and help them realize their values and regard their work as meaningful, purposeful, and important. Often, the risk of losing employees because their personal values don’t correspond with the team’s values is far greater than the risk of losing them because of compensation.
  4. Get regular feedback from your star employees. Ask, “What can I do as your manager to make our organization a great place for you to work?” Let them tell you what they need and what they like and don’t like about their jobs. Adjust their assignments and their work conditions accordingly.
  5. Invest in training and development. Give star employees opportunities to develop their skills and increase their engagement and job security. Hold frequent and formal career discussions to determine employees’ goals and aspirations and coach them.
  6. Give your star employees the autonomy, authority, and resources to use their skills and do their jobs in their own way.
  7. Keep them challenged and engaged. Make work more exciting. Set aggressive, but realizable goals. Move your star employees around into positions in the company where they will face new challenges and develop critical skills. Employees would like to be challenged, appreciated, trusted, and see a path for career advancement.
  8. Appreciate and give honest feedback regularly. Make timely and informal feedback a habit. Don’t disregard employee performance until the annual review. Help employees feel confident about your organization’s future. Earn their trust.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. General Electric’s Jack Welch Identifies Four Types of Managers
  2. Don’t Push Employees to Change
  3. Four Telltale Signs of an Unhappy Employee
  4. Seven Real Reasons Employees Disengage and Leave
  5. Seven Easy Ways to Motivate Employees and Increase Productivity