Employment Essay, Research Paper
Many years ago, it wasn’t hard at all to keep employees loyal and happy in their work. That was because the man of the house was mainly the sole provider for a wife and two to three kids. All they basically wanted was security and to be a happy family. It’s not so easy in today’s modern world where an employee has so many more options. I will discuss how we manage to keep employees loyal and satisfied in their jobs at our company.
The role of the manager is very wide, expansive and covers several different areas all at once. Our managers act as something similar to a press secretary in that they escort visitors and play tour manager of course, they also handle all the human relations tasks such as hiring, firing and motivating the employees under their charge. So far as relational roles they also act as liaison due to the fact that much of the information they use they acquire from the employees. Our manager’s act in several other roles with the information they receive. As a monitor in that they attempt to predict what to expect of competitors. Secondly, as a disseminator because much information has to be relayed to employees either by the manager or through some sort of media. Thirdly, with visitors they tend to act as spokesperson, also.
Managers have to make many decisions in our organization because we try to avoid micromanagement, Due to the avoidance of that micromanagement the manager tends to act as entrepreneur sometimes because they are making decisions that will affect the organization as a whole. Secondly, they act as police somewhat in that they need to settle disputes between employees. They handle the acquisition of supplies, also, whether it is personnel, physical supplies or monetary resources. Lastly, our managers also need to act as negotiators because they may need to sacrifice something important out of their own team to gain an important piece of equipment from another team.
The organization plays a very large role in motivation and morale employees need to know that when they come to work everyday they won’t have several different tasks thrown at them throughout the day. This reflects totally as to how the individual reacts towards the organization. We combat this “ Hey, you!” effect in our organization with a couple of methods. First, our employees receive schedules from their team leaders at the beginning of each week. These schedules cannot predict out of the blue emergencies of course, but the employees at least have a sense of stability. Second, we give the employee liberty as to how they plan and organize their day or week according to the most important tasks, which are established by the team leader.
Now those team leaders I mentioned are obviously in charge of teams. We firmly believe in the team concept to accomplish more here in our company. These teams are grouped in accordance with the skills of the employees. We aren’t going to put a marketing team in design, for example. How does our structure affect motivation and morale? Through time we have tired many different methods to motivate our employees. The methods that our employees most favored were the team concept due to the bonding between members that were involved. We maintain a high level of motivation and morale because of the team concept and once a week the teams set aside “fun time”,
We believe we also have very good incentives to keep our employees happy and loyal. Some of our incentives were even instilled by the employees themselves. We have a very good profit-sharing plan that allows an employee to choose which amount they want to invest out of their check. Up to a certain amount the company will match whatever the employee decides to invest in the company. To get to some of the more personal incentives we also established a daycare facility. It all started when we were in a smaller building and employee had problems arriving on time because they had to take their children to daycare or school. Obviously we couldn’t do anything about the school factor, but we could do something about the daycare situation. We needed a larger workspace for our company anyway, so we found a building with an excellent floor that we could dedicate to a daycare facility. It’s actually very interesting how we fund the daycare. We take excess funds or monies at the end of each quarter and buy medium risk certificates of deposit on six-month terms. The last incentive which may very well be the best incentive according to the employees is the skill based pay. Not only do our employees make more with the skills they have but we will pay for half of each class that our employees take. We believe that if we assist them in bettering themselves they will stay with us and use these new skills to help our company. Several employees have gone on to finish their graduate degrees and a few employees continued up through the ranks and are now senior management here in the company. This is the main reason that we try very hard to keep our employees until they are senior management or leadership quality.
Which is why our employees respect the leadership, because they know almost all of them came from the ground up in the company. Our employees will follow the leadership because they are not afraid of working. Most of our competition relies on outside hiring of their leadership but we try to promote from within strictly because of that reason. Another reason our employees stay with the company is that we exercise a little enjoyment in our company. One way is we let the employees take charge every once in a while, for example, we will have a drawing and one employee will win a day in the life of an executive. One other way we get results out of our employees is to award the highest production employee or who has the highest sales with either a day in the life of an executive or the parking space of their choice for the whole week. So, as anyone can see we do many things for our employees to keep their morale up and keep the employee employed with us.
In the end, if the employees aren’t happy with where they are working they will be trying to find other employment. Which in turn takes away from our production because the other employees will be concerned with what a good job the other person managed to land and what kind of benefits they are receiving. Leadership is a big part because if the employees see the leadership pawning off their work on the employees then they won’t want to work for them. The biggest part of the pie however, has to be motivation and morale, which has to do with benefits, leadership and several other factors which I believe we attempt to give to our employees.