Tuesday, August 19, 2008

Risk of Employees

A CFO Service is to analyze and assess the risk of employees. There are several angles in assessing this risk. One angle is certainly assessing risk from the competence and talent standpoint. Another Angle is assessing the risk of losing key employees, while still another angle is assessing employee handbooks and treating employees within the law.

Once a poor performing employee is recognized cut your losses and get that employee out of your organization. Having sub par performing employees is a major risk for a business. Not only are they a risk to the performance of a business but they can pose a legal risk as well. Sub par performers decrease the morale of the other employees and reduce overall productivity. Get rid of them!

It is a valuable CFO Service to suggest ways to keep key and high performing employees. The best ways I have seen to keep key high performing employees happy is to provide them with bonus programs that produce win-win situations for both the employee and ownership. The CFO should help develop a metric or group of metrics used to determine what the bonus or incentive program should be that would generate that win-win situation for key employees.

The risk of not having an employee handbook is huge. An employee handbook and following the provisions in said book ensures that you are handling all employees the same way. The worst situation you can have is treating one employee one way and another employee a totally different way. This leads to employee lawsuits and ugliness. The ideal situation is to have an employee handbook, have all employees sign it and then follow its provisions.

On a final note, one of the best ways to motivate all employees collectively is to establish productivity games within the workplace where all employees participate to win a productivity game as a team. Once the team hits the productivity target they all win. Just like in a team sport when someone is not pulling their weight team members work to motivate those employees. Ted Castle at Rhino Foods in Burlington Vermont actually puts this plan in place and is tremendously successful at motivating employees.