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Happy Employees = Happy Customers
The notion of happy employees leading to happy customers is not a new revelation. Indeed, many leaders believe in the notion.
In my view, to maintain a happy staff, the first and foremost rule is to maintain an open-door policy. A leader’s willingness to be available for employees to discuss concerns or problems is paramount.
Another component of maintaining a happy staff is follow-through by leaders. If employees feel their leader will follow-up and look into issues or concerns that are raised by employees, they will have confidence in their leader.
And having your employees’ backs is a very important component for maintaining good staff morale.
On several occasions, I have traveled to jobsites in order to stand with a site supervisor in a tense situation with a general contractor. One such situation that comes to mind was a new construction job where a general contractor’s young project engineer was making excessive phone calls that amounted to harassment of our site supervisor and project manager. The solution? I traveled to the jobsite, found the general contractor’s project manager and engineer and told both that from now on, if they wanted to communicate with our people, then they were to email only. If any phone number associated with the general contractor showed on our employees’ phones from that moment forward, that their calls would go unanswered. The phone calls stopped within three days. In this instance, the leader was there for their employees and followed through by backing them up. If you’re going to “talk the talk, you’d better be willing to walk the walk.”
What we have learned: Because of experiences like these and feedback I have received over my years of having an open-door policy, we have made a conscious decision to work almost exclusively with facility managers and building owners primarily on roof maintenance, re-roofing and building envelope projects vs. with general contractors on new construction projects. Our staff is happy, and so are our customers.