Why can’t my employees just do things the way I want?

Are you frustrated by employees who won’t consistently do what you want, when you want or how you want?

It is one of the most common frustrations that I hear as a business coach. It takes up many frustrating hours, causes a lot of unwanted stress and it is something that, if tackled head-on, can be sorted out fairly quickly.

However, the only way to start solving these types of frustrations is for you to take a good, hard look at yourself to make sure you aren’t the major cause of the problem.

It is always easy to point the finger and blame others, but the problem with that is you aren’t taking ownership. Without ownership you can’t fix it, instead upsetting a lot of people and in the process risk losing employees with great potential.

Benefit of the doubt

You should start by giving the employee the benefit of the doubt (as painful as this can be some times). Talk to your employees and ask them lots of questions about why things were done in a certain way or not done at all.

I believe that 99 per cent of employees go to work to work each day wanting to do the right thing by their employer. Very few deliberately go to work thinking “what can I do to really annoy the person who is paying me?”

What business owners usually find is that the employees really didn’t understand why things were meant to be done in a certain way. No training was ever provided. Nothing is documented. And very rarely is there any feedback to confirm whether something was done correctly.

A good example of this happened recently to the owners of a plumbing business. They found they were spending each weekend fixing up all the ‘stuff-ups’. They said it was difficult to find the right employees and wanted to sack a few of the guys but the trouble was “good tradesmen are hard to find, they are all working on big dollars in the mines.”

Objectively collect the facts

After years of yelling and complaining they decided to tackle things differently. Firstly, they started collating information on the type of mistakes taking place and who made those mistakes, without trying to lay blame.
They then spoke to the ‘offenders’ about the mistakes and why they were occurring. What came out of the discussions was that without realising it, over time, they had employed two types of plumbers - those experienced in commercial plumbing (high-rise buildings, factories etcetera) and residential (houses and flats).

The mistakes that were occurring were when they allocated commercial work to the ‘residential plumbers’ and the residential work to the ‘commercial plumbers’.

They noticed there were very few mistakes where the jobs were allocated to people with the right skills.

Too scared to ask!

The also discovered many employees were worried about losing their jobs and were too scared to admit they couldn’t do certain jobs. They just did the best they could and let the owners fix the mistakes up on the weekends. On many occasions they weren’t even aware there had been problems, so weren’t learning from their mistakes.

The solution were simpler than the owners ever imagined and certainly easier than sacking people and employing new people to make the same mistakes again. And most importantly, the team was now involved in the process.

The solution

In just a few weeks, the number of “stuff-ups” were reduced by over 80 per cent.

Jobs were allocated based on the skill sets of the plumbers. They also looked at the mix of guys sent to a job.

For example, an inexperienced residential plumber is teamed up with an experienced commercial plumber as a form of on-the-job training.

It is going to take a little while but soon they will be able to send any plumber to any job and know that it will be done correctly.

A focus on training

They also allowed each tradesman to nominate a course they would like to attend to improve their skills. If they successfully complete the course they receive a small financial bonus. The higher the skill level then the fewer mistakes will be made.

Rewards for getting it right

To highlight the importance of doing things right the first time, the owners are also going to introduce a monthly team bonus based on the percentage of jobs completed without any ‘stuff-ups’. Peer group pressure is now on the owner’s side. Everyone wants their bonus so it is better for the guys to ask if they don’t know, rather than not ask and get it wrong.

A team effort and everyone wins

The owners of the business now have their weekends off. Customers are happier, jobs are more profitable and expenses have been reduced by not having to buy additional materials to re-do jobs. Employees that were considered hopeless have now been turned into more confident and effective employees.

So if you aren’t happy with how things are being done in your business, ask around - it might just be your fault. In the process, you will be a step closer to having the business operating exactly how you want it to.