Dangerous Things That Happen If You Clip Your Employees Wings

Dangerous Things That Happen If You Clip Your Employees Wings You are the brain, the heart and the central nervous system behind your SME. You are the reason it exists and you’re the one maintaining the standards and values that make your business stand out from your competitors and keep your loyal customers and clients coming back again and again. But as vital as your skills, knowledge and expertise are to the smooth running of your business, no entrepreneur is an island. Your employees’ contribution to the success of your business cannot be overlooked. It’s their hard work, their ingenuity, their imagination and their dedication that’s gotten you where you are today. As such, you owe it to them to develop them and help them to achieve their dreams and invest in their ongoing development. There are many reasons why entrepreneurs fail to develop their employees adequately. Perhaps they’re wary of the expense and disruption caused by training and development. Perhaps they’re worries that if they make their employees too attractive to their competitors they’ll risk talent flight. Or perhaps their vanity won’t allow them to let their employees exceed them in ability, knowledge or competence. While all of the above are understandable to an extent, there’s absolutely no reason why an employer should deliberately deny knowledge transfer, as you’ll see in this fascinating article on the subject; http://blog.stevetrautman.com/you-are-here-knowledge-transfer-defined/. If you withhold opportunities to benefit from your knowledge including training, performance management and continuing professional development it can have some seriously detrimental effects on your business… You bottleneck their efficacy Entrepreneurs should be extremely wary of bottlenecking how well an employee can not only do their job, but deal adaptively to the day to day problems your business faces. Employees need to feel that they can bring their creative problem solving abilities to bear on the issues they face at work. If they do not, they will lean more heavily on their line managers or on you. This does not improve anyone’s productivity, least of all yours. Your turnover rate will soar Recruiting and developing new employees is a costly and time consuming enterprise and entrepreneurs generally want to spend as little time and money on it as possible. As such, many will employ retention strategies to make sure that their talented employees remain in house. If, however, you don’t develop intelligent and talented employees, they’ll quickly feel like they’re stagnating. They will get bored and their personal investment in their work will decrease incrementally as they find it less and less challenging, and ultimately less and less rewarding. Thus, your turnover rates will soar and you’ll be left not only with a dearth of talented and intelligent individuals but a plethora of costs in recruiting and developing their replacements. You damage your brand’s reputation Even the most dedicated employees will struggle to bring it to the yard if they feel that their employer doesn’t value them. Even if they’re well compensated for their work, if you show a lack of willingness to develop them their skills will stagnate and their commitment will dwindle. Inevitably this will have a negative effect on the standard of customer service they offer which in turn may cause irrevocable damage to your brand’s reputation.