Posted by The Blogging Desk on Tue, Mar 01, 2011
- By Andrew, "Deep Thoughts", Neumann
I know that you have felt the pain of what I am going to discuss below. Whether you are an entry level IT associate or a Corporate Executive that has held many ‘C’ level positions; we have all experienced a work environment that seems to be always short on qualified staff. The pressures and feelings of being overworked, as a result of this shortage, are sometimes too much to take, and for some, it has been the deal breaker that has convinced them to leave their current job and seek employment elsewhere. Well let me be the first to break it to you – the grass is not always greener on the other side of the fence however, it may be much easier to mow!
Employers are constantly faced with making decisions that will ultimately determine the success or failure of their company (talk about pressure). In the middle of these decisions is the resource that is most looked over, that of the dedicated – set your watch to their schedule because they are always on time - employee. An employer should not look at their employees as a replaceable commodity but rather an investment opportunity. Take time to invest in your most important resource and the return may be 10 fold. After all, while you may be the brains behind the operation, your employees are the backbone and they may be the resource that ultimately determines the success or demise of your organization. If your employees feel overworked and can justify, with concrete examples, that the notion of hiring additional help should be entertained, as an employer, you should at least LISTEN. The decision to hire/not hire is solely yours to make but if you make this decision without consulting your front line employees, those that touch your clientele each day, than you are more than likely making a misinformed decision.
This begs the question of ‘When is the right time to hire a new employee?’ In the back of your mind, I am sure that you are already crunching the numbers of what adding an additional salary to the payroll, adding another employee to the company’s healthcare plan, 401k plan etc. will do to YOUR bottom line. In that thought is the fundamental reason that you may find stagnation with your businesses growth. While you are worrying about what negative ramifications the addition of a new employee will have to your bottom line, you are hastily overlooking the potential increase which may result. Think about it in this vein and I am sure that you may begin to think differently about your decision to hire/not hire. As the CEO of a company, did you really put in all that time to grow the business from a garage based dream between 2 friends to a multibillion dollar a year, publicly traded organization and think that you would still want to be doing all of the administrative tasks that you were doing in order to get the project off the ground? If you don’t hire qualified personnel to do these tasks, this may be just what you find yourself doing – the mundane, paper chasing tasks that need to be done rather than say, what you are good at, selling the experience.
Ahhh, I just heard a click. Something made sense. I suppose to answer the question posed, the right time to invest in your success and hire is prior to your business experiencing growth. Having an employee ready to hit the ground running when you are suddenly staring at overnight success is money in the bank and who wouldn’t want a piece of that action?
