Deanna Baumgardner - joined NOLN (National Oil and Lube News) HR Podcast to discuss her approach for supporting your shop employees with Small Business HR. The bottom line...there is no blanket approach and it's important to customize each companies HR needs.
No matter the size of the company Deanna emphasizes that having a supporting work environment provides a way to keep your employees engaged. To best support shop employees, shop owners and managers should get to know and understand each employee, so they know how best to work with everyone.
Employees need to feel comfortable being able to speak to managers – even about what interests them – not just what is bothering them.
It takes practice and once you can identify their interests – you can add value by including what they like into the business engagement. Deanna shares an example of a construction employee having a love for photography and once the owner found out they allowed him to bring his camera in and help support marketing by taking photos of a completed job. It saved the company marketing dollars and created engagement with the employee… win, win! Strong communication can be streamlined by having a team meeting/daily huddle at the beginning of everyday to share a safety tip, share a shout out or kudos for an employee “Peer recognition is invaluable to the individual” – but also don’t forget to have the one-on-one conversations at regular intervals. There are more tools out there if you can’t always meet face-to-face. Deanna mentions a simple text message, email check-ins, hangouts with no “work talk” and just having a simple conversation that doesn’t have to be an in-depth meeting. Remember, we are all human and wanted to be treated as such.
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