Treat your employees well. It is the right thing to do. It always has been.
Not everyone will be happy and not everyone will see fairness and ‘good’ treatment the same way. But in every industry, leaders can look around at competitors and peers and see how their employees are treated. Every organization can listen to its employees and regularly assess how it is doing as an employer. If employees aren’t happy with their work, they are going to look elsewhere and they are not going to perform to expectations, theirs or a leader’s.
Here are some universal tenets that can help any leader evaluate how they are supporting their staff.
- Compensate more than the industry standard
- Promote opportunity for upward mobility
- Provide the resources for an employee to do their job well
- Proactively set boundaries between employees’ work world and their personal worlds
- Know the work your employees do. Give feedback. Recognize their work.
Here is a blog post from Leadership expert Mark Sanborn about the late founder of Texas Roadhouse, Kent Taylor. In it, Sanborn highlights several interesting and thought-provoking strategies for running an extraordinary business. They are not all applicable to all industries, but still good food for leadership thought.