I worked for one company who sent out employee cell phone bills every month and made us highlight any personal calls we made, so we could reimburse them. I worked for one company who would not let us have a single stamp to mail a personal letter. I worked for a company who made us cover the alcohol from every receipt on every expense report, no matter the quantity or purpose. I worked for a company who charged us to use the company printer.
As an employee, I didn’t get it. As an executive… I understand it even less!
There are three reality checks executives need:
- Employees will always win in the tit-for-tat game, if they want to.
- Your employees make far bigger decisions for the company than the cost of a stamp (or even a bottle of wine).
- Employees who know that you care for (and trust) them will return the favor tenfold.
It really is that straightforward.
From a pure capitalist point of view, the math is simple. If you make a $60,000/year employee track down their own 55-cent stamp, then you’re going to lose value from them. They are going to make time to mail that stamp, and that is time they could have spent doing better work for you. I would much rather my employee take 10 stamps and work an extra 5 minutes because they don’t have to leave early to make it to the post office. Hell, I don’t even want them thinking about the damn inconvenience of a stamp during the workday.
My job as an executive is to enable my employees to be as effective as possible for the company. My job is to remove unnecessary clutter so they can complete as much high-value work for me as possible.
Of course I want to be the kind of boss that I would want to work for. But, I also want to be the kind of executive that maximizes the value of his employees to the company. In this case, both qualities conveniently align.
Companies that nickel and dime employees over small stuff are sending the wrong message. They are not saying “respect the company’s resources,” as they purport. They are saying “$1 in cash to the company is worth more than $50 of your time.” Employees know the difference.
You trust your employees to do the big stuff. My team makes decisions about life-and-death engineering, complex accounting, and millions of dollars every day. If I need to demand that they pay me for the soda in the fridge, then I sure as hell shouldn’t be letting them make the bigger decisions that really matter for the company.
I have a duty to make their workday simple. I view it this way: a $75k/year employee costs $288 a day based on a 260-day work year (in my dreams). If I can spend $10 a day making them more productive, it will cost an extra $2,600 a year (a 3.4% burdened cost). If that employee is just 5% more efficient, the company made a killing.
The reality is that when you make it easy to work for you, employees are far greater than 5% more valuable (and productive). When they can grab a soda, mail an envelope, print their kid’s homework report, and have a glass of wine at dinner during a 3-hour layover in the Atlanta airport, without thinking about reimbursement, they know that you care about them. They know that you believe their time is valuable.
And when times get tough (and they will), and you’ve spent the last several years treating employees like humans and valuing their time, they’ll be there for you – even if you can no longer afford those little luxuries.
When things almost went off the cliff for us as a company last year, everyone that we asked to stay with us did (even when all logic said they shouldn’t). And when people asked me why they stayed with us, I told them: our employees know that I care about them, and in turn they care about this business. It is simple.
Jereme Kent is the CEO of One Energy.
