John Linton
It's a self evident fact in commercial life that a primary requirement is to satisfy, on an ongoing basis, the expectations of the organisation's customers.
It must be equally evident that it's necessary to satisfy the expectations and aspirations of the organisation's employees who deliver the services and provide maintenance and support of the services to the customers.
I have spent much of the last week reviewing the current performance and future career aspirations of Exetel's 27 current employees.
'Historically', Exetel has had a very, very low staff turnover with only 3 people who had been with us past their probation period choosing to leave the company in the past three and a half years. A low staff turnover is one of the very few benefits of a start up company that is reasonably well managed as the owner of the company can personally select the people they employ and then can remain close enough to each person to ensure that their career progresses and that any problems/issues can be detected and addressed almost as soon as they arise - this is because they can choose to work, literally, within earshot of all of the people in a small company
At approaching 30 employees that method of operational management isn't possble and, inevitably, problems/dissatisfactions arise that aren't detected as quickly as in the past and even if they are detected either aren't addressed effectively enough or sometimes not addressed at all.
As this has only more recently become a problem for Exetel we have not had any process in place to sensibly address it until now. Our method of addressing it was to distribute a 'template' set of questions to each employee to give them a framework to think about aspects of their current job and to offer ther views and then to look at what positions and remuneration they would like to aim for over the coming five years. Each employee then had a face to face meeting with a director of Exetel who wrote detailed minutes of the meeting which were then reviewed by another director who writes to each employee commenting on the abilty of Exetel to address any concern they raised and to give a summary view as to whether or not Exetel is likely to be able to meet their future salary and position expectations and timeframes.
Following the review of each persons concerns and aspirations and writing the summary letter to each employee I will spend some time this weekend looking at ways of addressing the concerns/inadequacies in procedures and operations that have been raised and what changes need to be made to fully address those issues in terms of process and procedure change and whether some re-organisaton of responsibilities needs to be done.
Equally importantly will be the work that needs to be done to help each employee put in place, and have agreed, the daily/monthly work, internal and external education they need to do to meet their stated short and medium term salary and position aspirations.
Exetel has been fortunate to date that its year on year strong growth has provided a 'natural' career progression for all current employees as that growth has continued to provide more, and more complex, things to be done. This process is a re-inforcement that Exetel will only be able to keep its most talented peope if the company continues to grow.
It will be an interesting weekend.